LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 

Chap.^yc6p9ngat No 

Shelf_._fc£2 



UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



Personal Religious Life 



IN 



The Ministry 



AND IN 



Ministering Women 



BV 

F. D. HUNTINGTON, S.T.D., LL.D., L.H.D. 

Bishop of Central New York 



NEW YORK 

THOMAS WHITTAKER 

2 and 3 Bible House 



C 



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TWO COPIES RECEIVED, 

Library of Congress 

Office of tifoe 



WM 1 9 

tt*gltt«r of Copyright* 



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60045 

Copyright, 1900 
By Thomas Whittaker 



SECOND COPY, 



Three of these addresses, delivered under 
the title of "The Relation of the Inward 
Life of the Clergy to their Public Offices," 
were put to print in compliance with a re- 
quest of fifty-five members of the Senior 
and Middle Classes of the General Theolog- 
ical Seminary several years ago. 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

I 

Singleness of Heart i 

II 

Spiritual Sensibility . . . .41 

III 
Self-Sacrifice 75 

IV 

The Ministry of the Church a Ministry 
from on High . . . .113 

V 
Thorough Service . . . .149 

VI 

Spiritual Helps and Failures in Keeping 
the Royal Law . . . .181 



Singleness of Heart. 



SINGLENESS OF HEART. 

We have no time for anything prefatory. 
The essential nature of the Kingdom of God 
among men, the drift of our recent Church- 
life, and such personal experience as I have 
had, establish in my mind the conviction 
that the work to which you are so near, and 
are drawing nearer every day, needs noth- 
ing so much as that it be made deeper 
work; that we need to deepen it more than 
we need to extend it, to diversify it, or to 
enlighten it with mere intellectual light, and 
that we cannot deepen it much in others 
unless we deepen it first in ourselves. 

The Ministry of Christ can never fulfil 
its calling so long as it takes its rule of liv- 
ing from the standards of the prevailing 
social Christianity. There are two orders 
of life, the order of nature and the order of 
grace. Whether the laws of the natural 
3 



4 - Singleness of Heart 

and the supernatural kingdoms are identical, 
as science and faith together may yet make 
them appear, is not now considered. I use 
distinctions that are actual and familiar. 
The Christian Priesthood belongs in the 
Order of Grace. It is sheltered under 
gracious covenants; it is sustained and com- 
forted by gracious nourishments; it is 
bound by gracious but unyielding obliga- 
tions; it must meet and abide a gracious but 
awful judgment. You may say all Chris- 
tian people are in the Order of Grace, 
ordained and unordained alike, by virtue of 
Holy Baptism, with its gifts, promises, and 
helps, and this is true. But there is a dif- 
ference none the less; and it is not merely 
a difference of degree. There is a differ- 
ence that is specific. The laity live and 
work principally and necessarily in the 
sphere of this world. Their relations to the 
world may be modified, regulated, elevated, 
sanctified, by the spiritual powers that play 
in the Kingdom of Christ. The men of the 
Ministry, on the other hand, live primarily 
and work distinctively in the Kingdom of 



Singleness of Heart 5 

God's grace. It is their home, their in- 
trusted estate, their field of husbandry, their 
banqueting-house, wide and satisfying. 
They do a gracious service. They breathe 
a holy air. They handle consecrated things. 
They rise up every morning to sacred labors, 
and lie down every night under an almost 
audible heavenly benediction. They draw 
"all their cares and studies this way." Is 
not the difference real and apparent? Out- 
wardly at least lay people live in the natural 
world, though guided in it by the Spirit. 
Clergymen live in the supernatural, dealing 
from it with the world of natural humanity. 
This world is visited by the Kingdom of 
God coming down in the Second Adam and 
the new creation from on high. The Min- 
istry is of that Kingdom from on high ; it 
represents that new creation ; it is the voice, 
the ambassadorship, the visible agent of the 
Lord from Heaven, a quickening spirit. 
Heaven is opened before and above other 
men; it is behind as well as before, and al- 
ways peculiarly with the men of the Ministry ; 
and it is their privilege, incomparable and un- 



6 Singleness of Heart 

speakable, to work directly from its inspira- 
tion and by its power. 

As this preeminence, not of personal 
faculty but of august responsibility, is 
special in kind, so it is conferred by express 
bestowment in Ordination. Like the tree 
and herb of the flora of the first creation, 
each divine gift produces "after its kind." 
The ordinance is according to the nature of 
the gift. The Church suffers terribly from 
superficial views of the grace of Orders. 
Mind, I am not speaking of an outward 
dignity, advocating clericalism, or encour- 
aging sacerdotal conceit. God forbid ! The 
Church suffers terribly from these things 
too. You will understand me as pointing 
to the whole spiritual character, tone, in- 
ward attitude and habit of individual clergy- 
men as they go about their holy business. 
If ordination did not transfer the man from 
one set of relations to another, if it did not 
alter the whole standing of his soul beyond 
everything belonging to his official func- 
tions, if it did not set him into new scenery, 
naturalize and domesticate him among su- 



Singleness of Heart 7 

perhuman fellow-laborers, and measure him 
by extraordinary tests of sanctity and self- 
denial, then it would be — what so many all 
around us imagine it to be — a well-devised, 
interesting, impressive ceremony, and noth- 
ing more. Outside the Church, Ordination 
is hardly supposed to have in it a Divine 
virtue at all. Inside, its official value is con- 
tinually asserted, but too often its profound 
and searching effects on the personal condi- 
tion of a man's heart and conscience before 
God are forgotten. Let me entreat you not 
to overlook them, but rather to make your 
whole devout life here an expectant, eager 
preparation to receive them. When you 
come thither you will have to judge your 
motives, aims, acts, sacrifices, even your 
morals, by a peculiar criterion. While you 
are here making ready for that great hour, 
you cannot be content to rise in your re- 
ligious frame no higher than the average re- 
ligious level outside these walls. 

In these few hours that I am to spend 
with you this week, my dear friends and 
brothers, I must speak and you must hear 



8 Singleness of Heart 

according to these profound truths. You 
cannot expect me, in this season of unusual 
access to the secret place of the Mercy-seat, 
in the solemnity which is upon us all alike 
on the eve-week of our Lord's Passion, to 
leave the line of tasks given me and come 
here simply to discuss the elements or to 
repeat the maxims of scientific ethics. Of 
the general duties of Christian penitence and 
prayer, self-scrutiny and discipline, you are 
reminded by manuals and directories— mul- 
tiplied and accessible — as well as by your 
daily worship. We ought to be occupied 
here, I am sure, with such special aspects 
of the higher states and practices of the 
spiritual man as must come before your 
conscience and your heart in the consecra- 
tion to which you are called. 

The Church in this country wants dea- 
cons and priests who have renounced self 
— self in the three forms of self-indulgence, 
self-will, and self-promotion. It needs no 
others. No others can rouse the nation 
from its spiritual deadness in materialism, 
in indifference, in frivolity and carnal luxury. 



Singleness of Heart 9 

Even intellectual disbelief, what there is of 
it — and there is not half so much of the in- 
tellectual anti-Christ as of the sensual— will 
yield to nothing else so readily. You are 
wanted, you may be said to be waited for, 
if you come with that self-forgetful mind. 
If you do not, if you cannot, then, with 
the most affectionate earnestness, with sym- 
pathy for you as well as a concern for the 
Faith and Cause of our Lord, I urge you to 
stop where you are. 

Emphatically I say we are not dealing 
here with the external denials of that Faith, 
in infidelity, or wilful error, or vice, or 
civilized heathenism, or the decorous forms 
of a rationalized Christianity. These are in 
large part prodigals of a violated conscience. 
To be sure, they are not disconnected from 
the internal life of the Church. They are 
aggravated by its inconsistencies in clergy 
or people. By subtle fascinations or over- 
bearing force they dilute its doctrine and 
corrupt its piety. But they do not enter 
directly into the particular class of difficul- 
ties, or the special lines of self-examination, 



io Singleness of Heart 

which engage our attention now. These 
interests are distinctively spiritual. They 
relate either to our own hidden walk with 
God, or else to those special experiences 
where our public service is most seriously 
influenced by our personal religion, and is 
in fact directly dependent upon it. What 
strikes us as the faulty feature in the reli- 
gious state of our community ? I think it 
is a certain thinness of Christian character. 
The great truths of the Creed are not de- 
nied, perhaps not even questioned; but 
they are held with a loose hand. Public 
ordinances of the Church are not despised, 
but they are respected much as any other 
customs are respected, social and literary, 
with a prevailing feeling that they may be 
attended to or let alone at each man's option 
or convenience, and let alone without loss. 
The language about sacred things remains 
unchanged, but it means less; it is the cur- 
rent paper of a depreciated capital. Some 
effort is made to keep up the ecclesiastical 
institution, or to obtain something for mis- 
sions; but the moment that effort comes 



Singleness of Heart 1 1 

into conflict with other expenditures, you 
see with shame how low the relative rank 
of God's glorious House and its divine 
economy is in comparison with the over- 
mastering attractions of business or wealth 
or recreation. These, just so far as they 
appear, are signs, I do not see why they 
are not sure proofs, of what it is fair to call 
by the name I have given it — a thinness of 
Christian character. If you prefer it you 
can call it lightness of conviction, or weak- 
ness of faith, or a decay of zeal. In any 
case it is what we are here concerned with, 
not in the community, but in ourselves. 
We can do much to remedy it. That is to 
be your high vocation. That it can be 
done you ought to believe, because the 
Word, the Promise, the Passion, the Pente- 
costal Fire and Wind, the Primitive Age, 
the great periods of religious revival all 
along, assure you that it can. How to do it 
is your question. No man can tell you per- 
fectly. You must seek the answer every- 
where. Ask it of the heavens above, ask 
it of the earth beneath, of the depths of 



12 Singleness of Heart 

solitude, of the heights of holy contempla- 
tion, of Scripture and history, and of the 
heart of man, most of all of the Holy 
Ghost. Seek the answer till you find it. 
We are here to-night to seek it. 

What I submit to you, then, is that this 
deep secret is to be revealed to you, and 
that the power to revive the dwindled 
energy and chilled life of the Church will 
be in you, in proportion as your own spirit- 
ual life is at once deepened and intensified. 
This may be said to be a natural law of the 
supernatural kingdom. The fact is forced 
upon us to whatever quarter we turn, 
whether to the general philosophy of spirit- 
ual influence, to the necessary conditions of 
the formation of character, to the great ex- 
amples and authorities in the past, to the 
comparative results of the ministrations of 
different men as we see them around us, 
to the New Testament, or, finally, to the 
personal ministry of the Saviour Himself. 
Mark the great spiritual movements of the 
Church, such movements as we all must 
long to see renewed. How have they al- 



Singleness of Heart 13 

ways begun ? Either with a new spirit of 
consecration, sacrifice, and closer inter- 
course with God on the part of the clergy, 
as in the time of the Oratory and St. Sul- 
pice under Philip Neri, Olier, de Condren, 
and their friends, and in England at Cam- 
bridge and Oxford respectively during the 
last generation, or else in sporadic agita- 
tions among the people, which, precisely 
because they had not the guidance of God's 
commissioned prophets and priests, were 
as transient as they were irregular. To say 
that a pastor or preacher can never be the 
means of leading individual souls in his 
charge to a higher religious state than he 
has himself attained would be saying too 
much. I suppose it is one of the most 
startling and humiliating if also in another 
view one of the most blessed discoveries 
that many of you will make as you go on, 
that you are furnished, among other mys- 
terious endowments, with the capacity of 
doing that very thing. Sacramental grace 
is not dependent on the man. However it 
happens, whether it is because our actual 



14 Singleness of Heart 

infirmities are partly concealed, or simply 
that GocTs grace works in ways that we 
know not, overflowing the measures of the 
earthen vessels, we do find not infrequently 
that persons in ordinary circumstances, who 
are almost exclusively under one clergy- 
man's teaching and with smaller advantages 
than his own, will pass before him and rise 
far above him in what makes up a holy 
character. And yet 1 think I need not argue 
with you that these exceptional facts do not 
invalidate the ordinary rule of the Kingdom 
we serve, that in heart, in religious reality, 
in strength and simplicity and steadiness 
of faith, in the power of the spirit, we 
must be what we teach if we would have 
others follow our teaching, or even believe 
it. How high the head-waters, so much 
fulness in the stream. 

In feeling this to be the first want, I am 
confirmed by the testimony which comes 
now and then, and lately more than ever, 
from Brethren who are most truly alive in 
this ministry, of largest experience, and 
most honored by abiding fruits. Be it true 



Singleness of Heart 1 5 

or be it otherwise that our times are pecul- 
iarly unfavorable to walking with God in 
any vocation, that forces are everywhere 
acting which dissipate and soften or hinder 
and unsettle the spiritual mind, that society 
is indevout, the air dry, the tone of life 
trivial, we have at any rate enough of these 
disordering influences on hand to make us 
very sober, to cast us back on radical prin- 
ciples of self-discipline, and to arraign the 
inward man with sharp and solemn judg- 
ments. Let it be with us, dear brothers, as 
if we kept a kind of vigil for the Great 
Commemoration that is at hand with its 
tender mysteries and meanings, — the Re- 
deemer's agony, cross and grave, seeking at 
the same time, by looking into that life 
which is "hid with Christ in God," by 
fresh resolves and supplications, by a more 
particular knowledge of our weaknesses 
and dangers, to be ready to arise and follow 
the Master whithersoever He shall lead. 
How often hereafter will the ear of God 
hear one and another of you crying in lone- 
liness for help in just this difficult, painful 



1 6 Singleness of Heart 

ascent into a noble fulfilment of the vow 
you will have spoken and the vocation 
wherewith you are called! 

Striking directly, then, into the heart of 
the whole matter, we encounter as the topic 
lying foremost in order, Singleness of Hearty 
first in your own life and then in your serv- 
ice; what the Ordinal calls " applying 
yourselves wholly to this one thing." Ana- 
lyzing the nature of this obligation we must 
distinguish between what the law of Christ 
requires of ministers as Christian persons, 
each one answerable for the ripeness of his 
own spiritual manhood, and what the same 
law requires of them as servants of all 
classes of men for their salvation. The 
two are inseparable, and yet they are dis- 
tinct. In almost every respect it is true that 
what makes for the character of the man 
makes for the strength of the minister; and 
yet one of the most disastrous mistakes of 
our profession is in overlooking the differ- 
ence; that is, in imagining that all is right 
in our interior state before God because we 
are diligent and busy in work. We con- 



Singleness of Heart 17 

stantly hear people who are passing judg- 
ment on the religious and moral qualities of 
a minister follow their various descriptive 
adjectives with the substantive " man ": he 
is such and such a man, not minister. They 
expect the common graces, especially the 
passive ones, in a rather higher degree than 
in other men; not a different sort. When 
they come to advert to experiences pecul- 
iar to the profession they are apt to specify 
traits and forces more of the mental and 
executive than of the spiritual man. He is 
"able" or "weak," "successful" or "im- 
practicable," "eloquent" or "dull." Re- 
ligious qualities are ascribed to the man, 
secular qualities to the clergyman. We still 
inquire, therefore, what there is about our 
calling which differentiates the clerical con- 
dition from that of the hearer or parish- 
ioner. Put the question in another way. 
Why are so many earnest pastors and 
preachers, being daily occupied with duties 
where there are certainly as many advan- 
tages for holy living as there are anywhere, 
nevertheless conscious of needing excep- 



1 8 Singleness of Heart 

tional helps, longing for extraordinary illu- 
minations and unusual refreshments from 
the Fountain of all their light and peace? 
It is because these duties, at the same time 
that they lay upon them singular demands for 
holiness, yet expose them to singular temp- 
tations to unholiness, — singular, I mean, in 
subtlety, complication, plausibility and per- 
tinacity. Perilous indeed is the state of 
that minister of the Gospel of Christ — I care 
not what may be his temperament or his 
attainments or his position — who has not 
found out how subtle, how plausible and how 
pertinacious these temptations are. They 
spring from three chief sources. 

First of these is the circumstance that the 
entire public administration of religion, even 
in this Church of Christ and His Apostles, is 
a mixture, and a mixture in which the two 
ingredients are likely to conflict with each 
other at any time, anywhere. It is one part 
spiritual, and one part material and tem- 
poral. The latter may at any time become 
self-seeking, unsanctified, anti-Christian. 
There will then be ambiguity if not duplic- 



Singleness of Heart 19 

ity, and either one is spiritual weakness, a 
fruit of spiritual disease. There has never 
yet been a period since Pentecost when this 
has not happened. The root-sense of the 
word "holy" in the scriptural tongues is 
"separate." We speak of the Church as 
holy, meaning that it is so in its origin, its 
purpose, its commission, just as all bap- 
tized people in the early Church were called 
saints. The ideal originates the epithets. 
The name is the name of hope, as the He- 
brews named their children, not of biograph- 
ical or historical fact. We speak of the 
Church militant: there never was a division, 
battalion, regiment, company or rank in the 
army that was made up of soldiers who 
were undistracted in their loyalty. I am 
not saying it could be otherwise, or that it 
was originally promised it would be other- 
wise, but so it is. There is a secular side. 
There is a financial economy. There are 
buildings, money-interests, money-pay- 
ments, bargains, salaries, various schemes 
and devices for conciliating the world in its 
worldly character. There is a capital op- 



20 Singleness of Heart 

portunity, not to say invitation, you will 
find, for the entrance and exercise among 
church-leaders of a policy and a manage- 
ment which have no inherent connection 
with the Gospel of life and salvation what- 
ever. Moreover, and this is worse, there is 
a natural alliance between these ecclesias- 
tical secularities and the personal gifts, ac- 
complishments and abilities of the clergy. 
Here we are. Amid all the sanctities and 
respectabilities of church-buildings and 
ceremonies the great Seducer will tempt 
you many a time to turn your Orders into a 
market, your Priesthood into a trade, and 
to sell your soul for some disguised piece 
of the world's merchandize. It is a fact 
of immense signification, of tremendous 
danger. Looking at it in all its appalling 
risks to ministerial purity where we live, or 
in all the mischief that has been born of it 
age after age, we might wonder that scores 
of young men go skipping into orders with a 
kind of gay alacrity, as sanguine as if there 
lay no fearful nest of deadly snares before 
their feet, as if no fierce and cruel hands of 



Singleness of Heart 2\ 

principalities and powers, of the rulers of 
the darkness of this world, moving in the 
shadows, were feeling after them to find 
them out, and to throttle all honor and 
fealty and simplicity in them if they can. 
Here is the first alarming condition beset- 
ting a clergyman's conscience. It is the 
world inside the Church using the secular 
element of its present organization to secu- 
larize him, by its bribes and prizes, its 
official honors and personal reputations, its 
patronage, vestries and applauses. I think 
you will agree with me that it has never 
been more generally aggressive than it is 
now, on the whole, not even among the 
ecclesiastical preferments and fortunes of the 
medieval churches, or in the English en- 
dowments and livings blindly bestowed by 
politicians or princes. Why ? Because 
here the worldly spirit comes from below 
as well as from above, and the whole mass 
of modern society is permeated by a dis- 
couraging confusion as to where the line 
between the world and the Church really 
runs. You are to live, God willing, and 



22 Singleness of Heart 

you are to be God's heroes or the devil's 
cowards, in this fight. 

I mention, secondly, what goes along 
with this seductive secular influence, giving 
it much of its perilous quality, — a natural 
susceptibility in us all to be impressed by 
any kind of power, resource, brilliancy, 
confusing the moral judgment and biasing 
the soul in favor of a false worship. It is 
needless to argue the universality of the 
illusions springing from this source, or to 
inquire of what better trait, put into the 
human nature by the Creator, the vulgar def- 
erence to it is a perversion. Young stu- 
dents start with it, carry it with them 
through their preparation, beyond ordina- 
tion, possibly to the end of their lives, just 
as they carry, in various degrees, other 
features of a half-disciplined or imperfectly 
consecrated manhood. The result is what 
the Church has all along been obliged here 
and there to see, clergymen of good ability, 
well meaning on the whole, well educated, 
useful in many ways, who nevertheless live 
from first to last in a shambling compromise 



Singleness of Heart 23 

between the principles of the Kingdom 
which they are sworn to defend and the 
pretensions or fashions of the world which 
that Kingdom was sent down from Heaven 
to condemn and overthrow. Be it a better 
salary or a cardinal's hat, a metropolitan 
parish or an academic title, a snug parson- 
age or social adulation, whatever reward 
the secret service to the " other King" may 
be, it is the same disloyalty. In like cir- 
cumstances and with equal cleverness they 
would figure along with Cardinal Wolsey 
or Paul of Samosata, who, with all their 
splendor, were but superb types of count- 
less village priests and city preachers bend- 
ing the knees of their hearts to Mammon, 
waiting on wealth, afraid of politicians, 
eager for visible success, rendering unto 
God only a portion of His clear claim, and 
unto this modern Caesar or his courtiers, 
dressed in a petty and brief authority, a 
great deal that is not Caesar's at all. It is 
only with the degrading effect of such ser- 
vility and such duplicity on the inner man 
that we have here to do. I adjure you to 



24 Singleness of Heart 

look at it through no mist, and early to gird 
up the loins of your minds to withstand it. 
Could some purging breath of the Spirit 
blow away from those who are setting 
their feet to the service of the Altar all am- 
bition for place and power and display, 
could they be trained in an unquestioning 
faith that the Church stands in its own 
right, is independent of the world around it 
and only seeks the world's salvation, could 
they verily believe that neither numbers nor 
revenues have anything whatever to do 
with her honor or prosperity, and that her 
officers have everything they need in hav- 
ing their Master's favor, then how soon 
bishops, priests, and deacons would stand 
forth in every land content, serene, rever- 
enced and trusted, beyond the reach of 
vexation, beyond the fear of failure! A 
periodical, which utters what many thou- 
sands of Americans believe without regret- 
ting, says: "The process of religious decay 
is partly due to the increasing commercial 
character of the Church organization. " We 
all know that simplicity of living and man- 



Singleness of Heart 25 

ners, an apostolical "weanedness from the 
world/' has drawn an involuntary respect 
and love to Christ's ministers of whatever 
name, giving them spiritual dominion even 
in spite of their loss of apostolical order. 
Retaining that order, ought we not to be 
ashamed to part with that power ? 

There is a third enemy to Singleness of 
Heart, the more serious in this respect that 
it presents a puzzling problem to our moral 
discrimination while it also tries our moral 
courage. How far is it right for Christ's 
servant to go in pushing forward into notice 
any personal gifts or accomplishments he 
may have, or think he has, in prosecuting 
the ends of his ministry ? By what means 
can we separate between making the most 
of our faculties for the glory of God, and 
making the most of them for our own 
glory ? The difference is plain enough 
stated in this way in words. I am sure we 
now and then see a minister whose powers 
are remarkable, and who yet so uses them 
that, while they incidentally create a reputa- 
tion for himself, they leave a clear impres- 



26 Singleness of Heart 

sion that he is self-forgetful and unambi- 
tious. But neither the abstract distinction 
nor the beautiful example will make your 
duty easy, whatever your powers may be. 
Take the matter, for illustration, in so sim- 
ple a shape as the performance of a single 
public service, including, if you please, 
reading and preaching. The better you 
read and the better you preach the more 
effectually will all the holy purposes of the 
occasion be fulfilled, those purposes for 
which your studies, your vows, your pray- 
ers and the Church's gifts in orders prepare 
you. But it is just as certain also that the 
better you read or preach the more the 
hearers will be likely to admire you person- 
ally, praise you, set you a little higher in 
your relative (professional) standing among 
your brethren, and the more likely it is that 
you will go away satisfied with yourself. 
You may be sure that many of the best of 
God's workmen confess to themselves that 
they have been all their ministerial lives 
perplexed by this complication of motives, 
and that no casuistry can make them com- 



Singleness of Heart 27 

placent at the result. It was a question in 
the first centuries of the Faith. One of its 
aspects was the right or wrong of placing 
young men destined for the Christian 
priesthood in the schools of famous pagan 
rhetoricians and philosophers, like that of 
Libanius at Antioch. On the one hand it 
was argued that the cause of the Saviour 
has a right in its servants to the best learn- 
ing and oratory in the world : on the other, 
that such heathen culture was not only 
liable to mislead young scholars and pervert 
them from the Truth, but that its tendency 
was to introduce into the Apostolic Church 
meretricious and ungodly methods foreign 
to the temper of Christ and the Cross. In 
substance the same debate may be con- 
tinued as long as classical literature and 
forensic practice make a part of the educa- 
tion of candidates: indeed longer than that, 
for even though the dead languages and the 
art of elocution were driven utterly out of all 
our academies, colleges and theological 
seminaries, there would still be human in- 
firmity enough left to perpetuate the temp- 



28 Singleness of Heart 

tation to personal vanity and literary con- 
ceit. The further we go into the subject 
the less practicable anything like a fixed 
rule is found to be. To resolve that you 
will execute your public functions with 
something less than a possible degree of 
excellence for fear you shall be proud of 
them, contracting your ability to save your 
integrity, would be absurd, though instances 
of it are mentioned in the biographies of 
morbid Divines, — about as absurd as for a 
mechanic to do poor work to prevent his 
employers feeding his avarice by granting 
him too much pay. And yet who of us is 
safe with nothing more than a vague and 
general intention to keep self under ? The 
fire is too hot for that. How can a service 
« be true to the spirit of the Lamb of God 
who pleased not Himself, whose meekness 
and magnanimity were equally complete 
and resplendent, or true to the first principles 
of His Heavenly Society, if there runs all 
through it this paltry alternation between 
the highest and the lowest thoughts, a 
puerile teeter of the mind between sacrifice 



Singleness of Heart 29 

and self-seeking ? What room, what al- 
lowance, what toleration for it is there any- 
where in God's Word ? But for the patient 
forbearance and forgiving mercy of our 
Lord, where should we be? How could 
He endure the contradiction of us sinners 
against Himself ? Some of the saints have 
been very frank. John Chrysostom was. 
As you read the homilies of that great mas- 
ter you see that his heart was as simple as 
his speech was golden. When the men in 
the audience clapped their hands and 
women waved their handkerchiefs he not 
only paused and cried out to them, "The 
church is no theatre; applaud me by a liv- 
ing practice of my doctrine;" that was 
easy. But he goes on: "When my dis- 
course is received with applause, I confess 
it, human weakness overcometh me and I 
am pleased. But when I go home and re- 
flect that you have received no benefit from 
my sermon, but have lost it in these 
sounds, I lament it, and feel that I have 
spoken everything in vain." When king, 
queen, crowds in the street were most 



30 Singleness of Heart 

ready to flatter him, he honestly seized the 
passing favor to arraign them with the 
keenest condemnation of their sins. Satan 
had not then wholly debauched the manli- 
ness of Christian parishes into the coward- 
ice of dismissing a pastor for denouncing 
open iniquity. This apostolic rebuker was 
finally banished from Constantinople and 
went into the deserts to die. But it was 
not the common people that rejected him; 
their generous instincts clung to him to the 
last; it was Eudoxia and the Court. 
" Whatever you may do," he says, once 
when the whole city seems to have been 
swept away by a contagion of sensuality, 
" I know what I have to do. I am respon- 
sible for every soul among you, and, 
whether you shut your eyes or become en- 
raged, I shall so act that I may be pure from 
the blood of all men, and be able to stand 
without fear before the judgment-seat of 
God." Fourteen hundred years later, in a 
country where the populace is King, we 
shall be but ill-furnished successors to this 
exiled John, or to that earlier John by the 



Singleness of Heart 31 

Jordan to whom he so often looked back as 
his pattern in boldly rebuking vice, if we 
are not prepared to find a court, a Eudoxia, 
or a Herodias, in a self-willed, self-indul- 
gent and capricious community. What we 
are to pray for is that we may hold fast 
singleness and sweetness of spirit together. 
One rule you certainly can adopt in this 
regard, and it would be a most wholesome 
one for your own welfare, for the instruc- 
tion of those you teach and for the dignity 
of your office. Never welcome or encour- 
age by any manifestation of pleasure in it a 
personal compliment for any sacred act be- 
longing to your ministry. Much less is it 
morally decent to seek by any half-con- 
cealed, indirect comment of your own to 
draw out such commendation. Reading 
prayers is a sacred act. Preaching is a sa- 
cred act. Imagine a Hebrew outside the 
Tabernacle complimenting a priest or a 
high priest on the artistic skill or grace of 
gesture with which he discharged his sac- 
erdotal duty at one of the national solemni- 
ties! Imagine a piece of flattery addressed 



$2 Singleness of Heart 

by Dionysius the Areopagite to St. Paul 
after he preached at Mars Hill, or anybody 
praising him for the diction or the logic 
of one of his Epistles! Remember how 
many times that heroic and yet " humble 
man of heart " has emphasized his entire 
distrust of his own powers and his intense 
disesteem for the praise of men. I lay some 
stress on this caution, because I am sure 
that consistently acting upon it is not only 
a point of good Christian manners, but that 
it would destroy a great deal of that lust for 
approbation which is at once a blemish in 
our behavior and a poison to our spiritual 
life. It would operate very much like cut- 
ting off the top growth of a weed when 
you cannot get at the root. Keep cutting 
and cutting, and finally the noxious thing 
will die for lack of what its nature lives on 
through its stock and leaves. The praise is 
pleasant, but it feeds an appetite. Reject it 
and the appetite for it will abate, perhaps 
finally perish. The habit of making a 
church robing-room a scene for laudatory 
comments, after we have been worshipping 



Singleness of Heart 33 

Almighty God and confessing our sins and 
preaching His Word, is incongruous. The 
recipient makes but a foolish figure; and if 
the by-standers' minds were actually un- 
covered there would be embarrassing dis- 
closures. What should we say if, after the 
engineer has run his train properly from one 
city to another, half a dozen of his fellow- 
workmen should think it necessary to 
gather round him to congratulate and eulo- 
gize him ? He would take it as an insult or 
a jest. He has done his duty, done his best, 
just as it is to be supposed the preacher has 
done his best every time he preaches. If 
he has done less he ought to be ashamed. 
Of course this has nothing to do with a 
simple utterance of gratitude out of the 
heart for some benefit, comfort, or strength 
received from a sermon. Such acknowl- 
edgments are refreshing cordials after min- 
isterial work. They are legitimate, as they 
are properly private, and they furnish a 
part of the wisest guidance we get in bet- 
tering our poor productions. Everybody 
can distinguish the two things from one 



34 Singleness of Heart 

another. We ought to have some courteous 
way of letting those about us feel that we 
understand this difference, and that while 
the one is distasteful, as every temptation 
ought to be, the other is acceptable, be- 
cause it belongs not so much to what we 
are, or do, or speak, as to the Spirit of 
Truth who has condescended to use us for 
the time, and to speak through our lips. 

Another consideration which I think 
ought to make the ablest ministers slow to 
magnify themselves in their ministry is that, 
although it has pleased Providence to em- 
ploy some eminent gifts in all ages in the 
service of the Church, by far the greater 
portion of the actual and solid work of the 
Gospel and Kingdom of Christ has been 
done by men of moderate parts. I do not 
forget exceptions. I remember that when 
Massillon in his later years entreated that he 
might be permitted to retire from Paris, and 
finally carried his point, the authorities in- 
terfered and persuaded the Pope to order 
him back to the metropolis. There are 
other exceptions far and near, but they are 



Singleness of Heart 35 

exceptions after all. Of the examples of 
great religious prosperity in parishes that I 
can recall, nearly all have been produced by 
clergymen of average ability, but always by 
those who in a faithful stewardship made 
the best possible use of what talents they had, 
and who united common sense, patience, and 
cheerfulness with hard labor. Indeed, it is 
somewhat doubtful whether in the long run 
and in all their bearings the ministries of 
very celebrated speakers have yielded more 
than the average measure of benefit or less. 
My dear brothers, we want the "single 
mind." I place that first. It is the mind of 
Christ. I have hoped by these examples of 
a common obliquity to turn your attention 
even while you are here to the underlying 
and indwelling sin out of which so many 
of our secular perversions and duplicities 
arise. The special offence we consider now 
is the double mind, a perturbed and soiled 
current of selfish ambitions and appetites 
running along the course of our consecrated 
calling. What name shall we give to that 
spiritual grace or holy frame of the inward 



}6 Singleness of Heart 

man by which this treacherous ambiguity 
shall be cast out, as fear is cast out by per- 
fect love ? Our Blessed Lord's saying in 
the Sermon on the Mount suggests the an- 
swer: "The light of the body is the eye; if 
therefore thine eye be single thy whole 
body shall be full of light. But if thine eye 
be evil thy whole body shall be full of dark- 
ness. If, therefore, the light that is in thee 
be darkness, how great is that darkness!" 
It is singleness of heart and mind: faXo^s. 
The thing that is anXous is a thing that is 
opened and spread out, without folds or 
hiding-places, like the expanded canopy, 
the generous front of the unwrinkled sky, 
into which all eyes may gaze and see all 
that is there to be seen; simplex, sineplicis. 
Do we not recognize it at once by its 
name as that transparent, crystalline purity 
of soul which we are to pray for and strive 
after as the fittest and worthiest of all in- 
ward states for him who speaks as the am- 
bassador of the Sinless One, in whose lips 
no guile is found, for him whose hands 
bear the vessels of the Lord, for him whose 



Singleness of Heart 37 

chief and unceasing concern is that which 
is signified in the august phrase, "the cure 
of souls" ? Do we not attribute it involun- 
tarily to every real saint whose image 
stands, luminous, venerable, enthroned in the 
hallowed halls of ages past ? Surely it is not 
presumptuous in us to long for it, to try for 
it, to hope for some increasing measure of it! 
If we can find out by what avenues the Ad- 
versary is most likely to come to assail and 
spoil it, and so set guards of watchfulness 
and resolution to protect it — if we can dis- 
cover what self-denial, what self-discipline, 
what contemplations or occupations will 
provide the strongest security for it, then 
no vigilance, no scrutiny or pains will be 
too costly a price for this singleness of 
heart. Above all, if we see it to be one of 
the divine marks of the Saviour Himself, 
who is "holy, harmless, and undefiled," 
seeking it for His sake, we shall then surely 
find it in Him, and in finding it find Him- 
self. 

And then how certain you will be to 
learn from Him not only the true spirit of 



38 Singleness of Heart 

your own personal life, but also in what 
humility and constancy, having the insight 
which the single eye commands, you can 
do all the least showy and the least prom- 
ising of the labors set before you! Jesus of 
Nazareth preached. An English hand, 
with firm and graphic lines, tells us how 
He preached. "He often spoke to large 
audiences, but He never refrained because 
His listeners were few. What minister 
charged with such a message as, ' Whoso- 
ever drinketh of the water that I shall give 
him shall never thirst, but the water that I 
shall give him shall be in him a well of 
water springing up into everlasting life,' 
would have told it for the first time to a 
poor sinful woman whom he met by the 
wayside ? Would he not rather have 
reasoned that his church must be un- 
usually full before such a marvelous an- 
nouncement could be delivered? Surely 
many masters in Israel should have been 
present to hear the answer to the question 
which has vexed and troubled the Church 
in all ages, as to where and how the 



Singleness of Heart 39 

Father was to be worshipped. But no; 
the same wondering woman, standing 
with her water-pitcher in her hand, was 
taught that neither exclusively in this 
mountain, nor yet at Jerusalem, 'was the 
Father to be worshipped, but that the true 
worshippers worship Him in spirit and in 
truth.' Jesus knew she would go on her 
way and stop every one she met to repeat 
what she had heard, and to say 'Come/ 
This, too, is our hope when the thought 
depresses us that these small means and 
talents of ours can never affect such masses 
of evil as we see around us. Each rescued 
soul becomes a light set upon a hill that 
cannot be hid, and many will make use of 
this light to guide themselves out of dark- 
ness." 

I do not know how many of you may 
have read a little book lately published for 
Christ's working men— little in bulk, but 
large in thoughts which stir and upheave 
the human world — written by one of the 
women who are doing more to make 
England noble than titles or coronets. It 



40 Singleness of Heart 

ends with these words: " Years and years 
hence, when you have grown old and sit 
with faded hands folded in the twilight, 
musing over your past life, see if the fairest, 
sweetest, most lasting joy is not the recol- 
lection of that early labor of love that first 
swept you up out of yourself into the very 
life of God, which is the redemption of 
the world." 

God the Father give you the single mind! 
God the Son deliver you from that idol of 
the world which the world has named 
"success!'' God the Holy Ghost grant 
that as He chooses you to stand before 
Him and to serve in His mysteries, so you 
may never fall from the grace of Holy 
Orders which you will receive of His 
bounty, through Jesus Christ our Lord! 



II. 

Spiritual Sensibility. 



II. 

SPIRITUAL SENSIBILITY. 

Last, evening the subject was that Chris- 
tian grace of the Ministry known in the 
New Testament as Singleness of Heart. 
We pass now to another. To bring it 
before you the more distinctly, I will ask 
you to call up before you an imaginary 
scene which, one day or another as time 
goes on, many of you here will probably 
say is not so much a fiction as the copy of 
a reality. 

A minister busily engaged in the varied 
offices of his calling, working on with a 
tolerable measure of apparent usefulness, 
finds himself in some unoccupied hour 
turning in upon the secret things of his 
own personal life. It may be late Sunday 
night. He is alone in his study. The 
public labor of the day has left him tired, 
but with the mental mechanism, in spite of 
some bodily weariness, rather stimulated 
43 



44 Spiritual Sensibility 

and limbered than dulled by the eight or 
ten hours of incessant strain now over. 
He is in a mixed mood, half satisfaction 
and half discontent. He has seen some 
signs of interest, other signs of indifference. 
There were some at the worship whom he 
did not expect to see, others absent whom 
he was anxious to reach. Some of his 
words went out on wings, Homer's enea 
nrepoevTa, and went home, he thinks, 
whither they were sent, with a freedom 
and energy not his own, as if they were 
arrows shot from a bow drawn by an 
unseen hand behind him. Others, which 
were wholly his own, into which he put 
more of himself, and which no afflatus 
from beyond himself seemed to take up 
and bear on, fell flat from his lips, far short 
of any conscience or any heart. He recalls 
a kind, appreciative look or word from a 
parishioner or stranger. It gives him pleas- 
ure; he does not now stop to ask whether 
it is the pleasure of vanity caressed or the 
pleasure of having let in upon some human 
soul a new impulse to holy living, planted a 



Spiritual Sensibility 45 

fertile truth, and put forth an awakening 
spiritual power. On another face, perhaps 
the face of a troubler in the parish, he 
thought he saw a trace of disfavor, cold- 
ness or a sneer; he does not now stop to 
ask whether the pain this gave was because 
Christ was dishonored, truth rejected, a 
soul injured, or because it was ominous of 
waning popularity, threatened the loss of a 
pew occupant, or hurt his pride. One mo- 
ment he is mortified that the discourse 
which he took to church with confidence 
or hope turned out weak, confused, or un- 
real, and in his disgust he would be glad 
never to preach again. But the mood 
changes, and he gathers courage to strug- 
gle once more after that ideal sermon which 
always is to be, but never is. 

So his thoughts run on. Suddenly, some- 
how, let us believe it is by the untraceable 
movement of the Spirit of God on his mind, 
this aimless process is arrested. The point 
of view is utterly altered. Retrospection 
gives place to introspection. He looks 
within himself, and lo, there opens upon 



46 Spiritual Sensibility 

him a whole interior world! What kind of 
a world is it ? The people, the faces of the 
congregation, the interests, success and 
failure, numbers and income, fame and 
favor, drift away. New questions arise to 
search and try him, what manner of man 
he is. If I am that man, I am thinking of 
a living circle of persons and things of 
which I am the accountable centre. The 
centre should be the heart. Can the circle 
be expected to be better than the heart is ? 
I am the guide of this people; but what 
guides me? I am their teacher; but at 
whose feet do I sit to be taught, in meek- 
ness, docility, and obedience ? The same 
passions or infirmities that I deplore or con- 
demn in them, are they not in me also, in 
forms less gross or obvious indeed, because 
the very safeguards of my profession re- 
quire that, but though more subtle and re- 
fined, yet just as untrue, unclean, unworthy, 
ungodly ? In a word, to the eyes of Christ 
how must a merely professional virtue ap- 
pear ? Is not this the very essence of that 
pharisaism which was about the only thing 



Spiritual Sensibility 47 

He unsparingly rebuked, or if carried a lit- 
tle further the hypocrisy which He unquali- 
fiedly cursed? Ought I not to suspect in 
myself that character which is only a char- 
acter of conformity; an integrity which 
might grow out of the position in which I 
stand; a religiousness which every interest 
of my life binds upon me; a chastity 
which, if not lost, is only not lost because 
it would carry away with it standing, influ- 
ence, reputation, salary, all together to- 
morrow; a devotion which is to my pros- 
pects in this world exactly what acuteness 
and adroitness are to a lawyer, or observa- 
tion to a doctor, or enterprise to a trader; a 
zeal and a fervor which are the instrument 
of my promotion and the measure of my 
distinction ? Is there no actual pressing 
peril here? Amidst all these fair-seeming 
activities of piety and charity in which I 
am engaged, is there not a fearful possibil- 
ity that my motives may gradually degener- 
ate till, in the apathy of solemn details, the 
torpor of only a perfunctory ministerial 
operation, 1 prove no better than the bond- 



48 Spiritual Sensibility 

men of the world ? I ask then, not What 
am I doing ? but What am I ? not How is 
the parish getting on ? but How does my 
inmost soul look to God ? What is the real 
spirit underneath all my work? Uncover 
my heart, O my God! and show me to my- 
self. Am I ready to take up David's cry in 
the Psalm, "Try me, O God, and seek the 
ground of my heart; prove me and exam- 
ine my thoughts " ? He will certainly hear 
me if I entreat sincerely, "Make me a clean 
heart, O God, and renew a right spirit 
within me. Cast me not away from Thy 
presence, and take not Thy Holy Spirit from 
me. O give me the comfort of Thy help 
again, and stablish me with Thy free 
Spirit/' When I have been so searched, 
cleansed, empowered from on high, "Then 
shall I teach Thy ways unto the wicked, 
and sinners shall be converted unto Thee." 

We come to another peculiar exposure of 
the vocation you have chosen, or let me 
rather say of your souls in that vocation, 
wherewith you believe you are called of 
God. I mean the benumbing and perhaps 



Spiritual Sensibility 49 

deadening effect of official routine, of the 
unfelt repetition of sacred tasks. What it 
leads to is spiritual apathy. Perhaps I may 
render you a service, such as only an elder 
brother can render a younger, by putting 
you on your guard against it. In its earlier 
stages it renders us superficial in religion, 
careless in prayer, unequal to great sacri- 
fices, slow in our perceptions of delicate 
moral discriminations, wanting in vigorous 
condemnations of sin as well as in clear 
recognitions of high states or graces, and 
awkward and impotent in dealing with 
difficult cases of conscience brought to us 
by our people. It produces religious medi- 
ocrity. We are thinking all the time of the 
functions and the organs; so many sermons, 
so many families to be visited, so many 
calls in a week, so many celebrations of 
sacraments, so many charities to be organ- 
ized and regulated, so many accounts to be 
kept, so many items to be entered in a par- 
ish register; we are not thinking so much 
of the original springs of life whence the 
function is vitalized and the organs derive 



50 Spiritual Sensibility 

their living force. Gradually the parish 
takes on more and more the aspect of a 
railroad, a regiment, a factory, or a bank. 
The minister unconsciously sinks more and 
more into a functionary, a superintendent, 
a presiding officer, a colonel, a manager. 
Those horrid phrases which the modern 
commercial mind has applied to the holy 
dignities of the Church come then to be fit 
descriptions: The parish is "run," the 
pastor and priest is " hired," he is " posted," 
he is a "stirring man," a " smart preacher," 
he makes the machine "go." Then certain 
second-rate qualities, like sagacity, shrewd- 
ness, popularity, social plausibility, joined, 
it may be, if nature has furnished the fac- 
ulty, with volubility or vocal skill in the 
pulpit, are advanced to the loftiest estima- 
tion in ministerial merit. The mortal ele- 
ments have encroached on the Divine, and 
more and more they degrade the mystery 
and hide the glory. 

Perhaps some dim consciousness exists 
that this process is going on. But con- 
science is quieted — this is the next stage of 



Spiritual Sensibility 51 

decline — by the apology that it is sacred 
work. There is so much that must be 
done, and it is done at least in the name of 
the Lord! The laity will not do their part. 
Time is cut up. Interruptions come con- 
tinually to the door. Public affairs are ex- 
acting—schools, philanthropy, dinners, con- 
ventions, fairs, semi-benevolent entertain- 
ments. How can we get leisure to take a 
long and steady look into the deep eternity, 
into the starry heights where the lives of 
saints shine, into the face of Christ ? And 
if we do not, shall we not be excused ? 
We are occupied about sacred things ; will 
not some of the sanctity cleave to our fin- 
gers ? Here all about us are spiritual subjects, 
scriptures, sanctuaries, symbols, robes, atti- 
tudes, titles; we are ordained; we are lead- 
ing an ecclesiastical life; must it not be that 
somehow the odor of this atmosphere will 
preserve us, even though we do not stop 
much to inquire what is going on in the 
secret recesses within, or do not withdraw 
and ask the brooding spirit of the Holy One 
to hide us under the shadow of His wing ? 



52 Spiritual Sensibility 

We will hope that by much speaking or 
much moving our shallow piety will be 
condoned. " The Lord pardon Thy servant 
in this thing." But will He ? Or will you 
be satisfied with yourself ? That depends 
on what your standard is; on what you 
long and hope to be. If professionalism 
will satisfy you, here it is. If a pattern of 
clerical propriety, or a series of bustling 
parochial demonstrations, large confirma- 
tion classes, filled seats, an astute ecclesias- 
tical generalship plus the tones and dress of 
a parson, are the sum and substance of what 
our Lord meant when He said: "Whom 
shall I send, and who will go for us ?" or 
when He rings through and through your 
heart the piercing questions of the Ordina- 
tion Office; if it is sacerdotalism that you 
covet instead of that profounder priestliness 
which keeps all the spiritual senses open to- 
ward God and heaven while the hands are 
busy here; if it is sheer outward success 
that you seek, instead of God's light in your 
breast, and God's love in what you speak, 
and God's mark on what you do — why, 



Spiritual Sensibility 53 

then, your Master may probably say of you, 
as He said of a class not very unlike you 
when He was on earth, "Verily, I say unto 
you, they have their reward/' But what 
the reward will be, what sort of honor, 
what sort of blessing, what sort of salva- 
tion — that is another matter altogether. 

There is a further depth of the same de- 
lusion, which I shall only touch briefly be- 
cause, in its extreme at least, it can hardly 
be supposed to be very frequent. I mean 
clerical antinomianism. You will see, how- 
ever, that it is a logical product or sequence 
of the fallacy that our sacred office protects 
us from temptation, or exempts us from 
the full stress of personal obligation, or 
makes up for us a special code of morality, 
so that what might be culpable in other 
men is pardonable in those who are con- 
versant with the forms and duties of reli- 
gion. Some of the grossest scandals in the 
Ministry, not only in past history but in 
our day and country, have sprung from 
precisely that root. Instead of the conse- 
crated vocation being taken as imposing a 



54 Spiritual Sensibility 

responsibility and a motive for a stricter 
obedience to the moral law, it is taken as 
setting him who is called in it above that 
law. This active servant is thought to be 
of too much importance to the purposes of 
the Almighty to be judged by ordinary 
rules. He extenuates transgression in him- 
self, possibly he commits and repeats hid- 
den sin, on no other pretence than that his 
general external religiousness warrants it. 
It is one of the most frightful abuses of the 
perilous art of casuistry, fit to be ranked 
with the seductive abominations of Liguori. 
A fair deduction would be that the nearer 
man comes to God in his employments, the 
less scrupulous he may be in his conduct. 
The link between religion and righteous- 
ness would be dissolved, and the door would 
open for the new school of Pagan philoso- 
phy appearing lately on the continent of 
Europe, whose creed is that a personal 
Deity is perhaps a scientific necessity, but 
that his moral character is mixed, evil deific 
attributes being mixed with the good. 
One may say — I am sure / am in no dan- 



Spiritual Sensibility 55 

ger of being betrayed into sanctimonious- 
ness or immorality; for my whole conscious 
nature revolts at both the one and the other. 
But are we so sure that we are in no dan- 
ger of a less noticeable decline of spiritual 
purity and vigor? It has been often ob- 
served that, in theological schools, the con- 
stant occupation of the mind in the study 
of divinity is very far from supporting a 
high religious temperature in the student. 
No doubt pastoral activity and sympathy do 
much to remedy this morbid suppression 
of the devotional by the scholastic habit, 
and yet I think the difficulty by no mean° 
ends at ordination. 

Why should we not recognize an analogy 
between the influence of mechanical task- 
work on the spiritual life of the ministry 
and on the intellectual force spent in secu- 
lar pursuits ? Every kind of work that de- 
serves to be done at all deserves to be 
nourished and enlivened from a fountain of 
inspiration higher than itself. The notion 
that a merchant or engineer, a lawyer or a 
physician, can get all the knowledge or en- 



56 Spiritual Sensibility 

thusiasm needed in his employment while 
he is busy at its details, is fatal to liberal 
attainments or great achievements. There 
are two ways of doing all v/ork. One is to 
succumb to the necessities of the task, to 
fill the time, to finish the job, to get a liv- 
ing, to plod abjectly through the wonted 
motions, with no spring, no light, no joy. 
As there are metallic craftsmen and auto- 
matic operatives, so there are preachers 
with whom, when the text lifts the gate, 
the mill-wheel of the sermon begins to re- 
volve. They miss the charm which God 
has woven, for those who choose to catch 
it, about every honest calling, and above all 
others about the Christianizing of men and 
the communicating of God's life to the 
world. A service so intensely engaging 
ought not to lose its fascination by the rep- 
etition of its forms. Masters in any pursuit 
see their position not only on its actual but 
its ideal side. If we call this enthusiasm, it 
is an enthusiasm without which most of 
the intellectual monuments and glories of 
all time would never have been. When 



Spiritual Sensibility 57 

Anaxagoras, the astronomer, was rebuked 
for neglecting affairs and offices of state, he 
replied: "My concern is for my country in 
yonder sky." It is told of Dante that he 
went out to see a pageant in the streets, but 
was so profoundly preoccupied with other 
processions in other worlds that he came 
back not knowing that the pomp had gone 
by; and of Rittenhouse that he actually 
fainted with the excitement and delight of 
observing after long expectation the transit 
of the planet Venus across the disk of the 
sun. 

The analogue to these examples of mental 
sensibility is the spiritual life in which every 
minister of Christ must maintain himself 
who would not have his ministration be- 
littled in his hands, and himself at last a 
"castaway." What ideality is to the artist, 
the poet, the originator anywhere, devotion 
or communion with God is to a parish 
priest. Indeed, the best scientific mind in 
our day in pure mathematics has argued 
that ideality in the investigation of nature is 
the connecting link between the natural and 



58 Spiritual Sensibility 

the supernatural, and forms a philosophical 
basis for the necessity of at least a theistic 
religion, with prayer, for every thinking 
man. 

I used the word "castaway." What is 
St. Paul's meaning in the ninth to the Co- 
rinthians? 'AdoKiiios, you learn, is one who 
not merely comes in after the other runners 
at the end of the race, failing by reason of 
some want of strenuous effort while the 
contest is going on, but one who has been 
untrue to the very conditions and law of 
the race itself, who is defective in the 
preparation or training beforehand. He is 
precisely in the fault of the steward of the 
Mysteries of God who rushes through the 
round of his duties without having been 
made equal to them by secret spiritual dis- 
cipline. In the Olympics, the amount of 
time occupied by the public struggle, a trial 
of strength or speed, was almost nothing 
compared with the athlete's previous exer- 
cise. Days, weeks, months, with temper- 
ance, self-denial, self-bruisings, were not 
too much to get the body in due order. 



Spiritual Sensibility 59 

The flash of human forms and straining 
limbs across the arena was but the short 
test of what the long antecedent drill was 
worth. The running, " not as uncertainly," 
the fighting "not as one that beateth the 
air," depend on that patient keeping under, 
that enslaving of the flesh, in retirement, no 
eye looking on, no cheers or "cloud of 
witnesses" lending exhilaration. WnwmdZw 
nai douXaya>ye<!>. What will sustain both the 
tedious and the victorious trial ? Not apa- 
thetic repetition. There can be no routine 
performance here. All Greece is looking 
on. Dear brethren, can you help asking 
yourselves how you will bear the applica- 
tion of this searching image of the Apostle 
to yourselves when you shall have become 
runners, watchmen, contestants in a differ- 
ent "agonizing" ? whether, lest you should 
be castaways, you are as anxious to lay in 
fresh supplies of power, that you may save 
yourselves and them that will hear you ? 

If we examine the chief terms that desig- 
nate the ministerial office, we shall see that 
they involve this doctrine of a supply of 



60 Spiritual Sensibility 

something in our own souls which has to 
be not merely kept from expiring, but 
added to and revived, to save us from de- 
generation and contempt. " Minister " im- 
plies something to be ministered. No more 
can be imparted than is contained. No 
more can go out than comes in. For the 
thing ministered the Apostolic name is 
"grace." It is true that it is not of our- 
selves; it is of the Holy Ghost, and comes 
down from above. But it does not force 
its way down. There are conditions of re- 
ceiving it as well as of imparting it, and 
they are vital conditions. We are not mere 
conduits of the divine stream, or pipes of 
the divine sound, or polished reflectors of 
the divine light. Adopt what theory of 
sacerdotal authority we may, we cannot 
pretend, unless we break loose from 
Scripture altogether, that in the Christian 
Church the New Testament term which 
designates ministerial service is separable 
from personal character, or that the priest- 
hood is not wounded when the priest is not 
holy. From beginning to end the Bible 



Spiritual Sensibility 6\ 

never implies that we are only functionaries 
or operators. " Be y e clean that bear the ves- 
sels of the Lord." But you are to be more 
than vessel-bearers, more than vessels. 
This "grace," "gift," "life," "message," 
call it what we will, descending from on 
high, must enter us first as conscious re- 
ceivers, becoming assimilated to the springs 
of our personal being. Otherwise we are 
like wooden cisterns from which the water 
is evaporated; the vessel itself cracks and is 
useless. Nothing will make up for the loss 
if there is not a direct drawing from the 
"wells of salvation." Nothing in pastoral 
activity can take the place of that power 
which comes directly, however silently, 
from an immediate contact with the un- 
seen. Where there is no vision the people 
perish — more accurately, are let loose, or 
run wild as barbarians. It was the darkest 
time in Israel when there was no "vision." 
In the Patriarchate, the Hebrew common- 
wealth, the empire, while a strict ritual 
protected the woVship of the Sanctuary, the 
moral strength of the nation was renewed 



62 Spiritual Sensibility 

by voices of prophets coming freshly forth 
from communion with God in solitude. 
Our divine Master was oftener alone than 
in the Temple. The power of His hours in 
the Mount is felt in His miracles among 
human dwellings and His preaching by the 
wayside. To what an inferior level the 
whole work and speech of the Apostles 
would be reduced but for their frequent re- 
treats into solitude and their continuing in- 
stant in prayer! 

It is time to mention two or three of the 
particular means of gathering and regather- 
ing this needful ministerial grace. We will 
place first what I have just alluded to — 
seasons of seclusion carefully provided for 
and guarded in the plan of living. Is it not 
remarkable, in the biography not only of 
ancient prophets and saints, but of great 
characters generally, that in some period of 
their lives they were held apart from men ? 
Much intercourse with society tends to 
make clergymen ready and broad probably, 
but if it is perpetual it tends also to make 
the clerical character superficial and thin. 



Spiritual Sensibility 63 

Something is felt to be wanting. A min- 
ister has serious reason to suspect some- 
thing wrong in himself if he finds that he 
is uneasy at being left alone. The habits 
of the clergy are much changed. Formerly 
constant publicity was not expected, and 
it was rare. In country places the tempta- 
tion to it is comparatively not very great; 
there are no book-stores or other convenient 
resorts; the families are scattered, and are 
not looking for visitors till toward the end 
of the day; public assemblies suitable for 
ministers are not very frequent. In cities 
and large towns it is otherwise. But it 
may be said of the theological student and 
the minister alike, wherever each may live, 
that for the most part when he goes into 
company it should be either directly or 
indirectly for the benefit of others. That 
was our Lord's example. He took pains to 
draw the disciples aside. "Come ye apart 
and rest awhile." Deserts and silences ap- 
pear to have been regarded as a positive re- 
quirement in the economy of mediation. I 
know how easy it is for a pastor of execu- 



64 Spiritual Sensibility 

tive tastes and abilities having manifold 
sorts of church work on hand, with hourly 
interruptions, to content himself with the 
reflection that he is meant to be a toils-man 
and a minute-man, pleading that so only 
his time is given to the people they should 
be satisfied. We are here, however, deal- 
ing with general principles of the spiritual 
life. I believe it is quite impossible to 
maintain it at its highest degree of sensi- 
bility or its healthiest action without so 
much systematic sequestration as shuts off 
the presence of all people, leaving an unob- 
structed access to the soul of the Spirit of 
God. 

This rule may be supplemented with an- 
other. It will do very much to sustain and 
vitalize personal piety, and to break up the 
narcotizing effect of routine, if while en- 
gaged in your various sacred offices you 
put forth special efforts of the will, to join 
your own personality with the function, so 
as to make what you read and say arraign, 
rebuke, encourage or comfort — as the case 
may be — your own soul. Consider the 



Spiritual Sensibility 65 

ministration addressed to yourself as much 
as to the congregation. My impression is 
that if, at the close of most of our services 
in church, we of the Ministry look back 
with this view, to see during how much of 
the time we were conscious of any such act 
as bringing home to ourselves the words 
we have used, or conscious of being di- 
rectly in the presence of our Lord, we are 
humiliated. Yes, dear friends, we argue 
and debate and contend fluently about 
Christ's real presence; but how often when 
we are standing or kneeling in His holy 
place, speaking for Him, speaking to Him, 
touching perhaps the very symbols of His 
agony and seals of His mercy, do we real- 
ize what His presence is, or feel it in our 
souls that the eyes which searched Peter's 
heart search ours ? that the ears which 
heard the prayers of pharisee and publican 
hear ours ? Still more ashamed should we 
be if we should recall accurately what the 
thoughts glancing through the mind ac- 
tually were. Were they thoughts of our 
pardon, or our performance? Of other 



66 Spiritual Sensibility 

men's impression of us, or of God's unerr- 
ing judgment ? Are we praying while we 
read prayers ? In the Confession, is it at 
all as if all mortal ears were removed, and 
the pronouns became singular ? In the 
Lessons, does the Word of God strike in 
upon the heart to be heard there while it 
goes out to the audience ? At the Euchar- 
istic Feast, does the entrance of the life- 
giving food make our oneness with Christ 
and the Sacrifice of the Cross such realities 
to us that the accessories of the scene — 
numbers, music, postures, manipulations, 
manners at reception — recede to their due 
subordination ? Is it not very significant 
that in God's earlier Church the priest did 
at the great offering first make atonement 
for his own sin and then for the sins of 
the people? In proportion as we get rid 
of ourselves, this personal appropriation of 
the divine nourishment, this personal real- 
ization of the worship that we lead, be- 
comes possible and becomes blessed. 

Much the same might be said of pastoral 
calls. He must make his way through 



Spiritual Sensibility 67 

them, it seems to me, with a shallow mind, 
who does not gather from them quite as 
much as he imparts; who does not bear 
away for his own warning or consolation 
as much as he leaves behind. All human 
lives, that touch one another at all, in- 
fluence and fashion one another. It would 
be shameful if by what I see of the suffer- 
ings wrought by sin in any member of my 
flock my own sins were not rebuked and 
made hateful. It would be a terrible loss if 
each instance of saintly goodness or sweet 
trust or domestic magnanimity I see did not 
revive my own sluggish virtue, or quicken 
me a little in my inglorious and halting 
way. But there is not the least reason to 
expect that anything of this kind will hap- 
pen unless by voluntary attention you turn 
what Providence shows you of the work- 
ing of His hand in these neighbor-lives into 
testimonies and commandments and prom- 
ises for yourselves ; unless you cry with all 
your might, "Show Thou me, by those 
side-lights about my path, the way that I 
should walk in!" 



68 Spiritual Sensibility 

There is one other special way of keeping 
alive the spiritual sense — a way wonderful 
yet very practical. It is that while we are 
engaged about our hallowed work we re- 
cur habitually to the fact that we are sur- 
rounded and witnessed by supernatural 
companions in the invisible and spiritual 
world. As ministers going through divine 
service in church we are always to think of 
ourselves as ministering in the company of 
the Lord Jesus Himself. We are also at- 
tended by a multitude of worshippers wor- 
shipping with us unseen, a never-disap- 
pointing throng even when we see before 
us only two or three or one. To believe in 
such companionships is an incalculable sup- 
port. Why should we not believe in them ? 
Throughout the gospel history, from the 
Annunciation to the Ascension, we stand 
before opened heavens. Such is the nat- 
uralness of the supernatural, if we may say 
so, that Christians of every period reading 
Holy Scripture have felt no more surprise 
at the mention of a messenger from an- 
other world as appearing near the Son of 



Spiritual Sensibility 69 

Man than at any other biblical occurrence. 
The same is true of the lives of the Apostles. 
At the same time, am I not right in saying 
that we meet large numbers and even bodies 
of modern Christians to whose habitual re- 
ligious ideas and feelings all this other- 
world life is completely foreign ? Are there 
not thousands and tens of thousands of 
them from whose religious convictions and 
associations, and sympathies, even in their 
most devout seasons, it all lies off — not ex- 
actly denied, but legendary or apparitional ? 
Cherubim and Seraphim, St. Michael, and 
all the company of Heaven, Paradise, the 
returning spirits of Moses and Elias, are to 
them only the machinery of a poem. Peo- 
ple treat them as dry critics do the epic 
supernaturalism of Dante and Milton. Has 
all this no effect on practical piety, on char- 
acter, on worship, and the whole service 
of the Ministry ? When living glories have 
vanished from the skies, leaving nothing 
there but soulless spheres about which as- 
tronomers dispute whether their frosts and 
fires permit any life to be in them at all, 



70 Spiritual Sensibility 

when everything in space beyond the Andes 
and Himalayas is reduced to barrenness, 
and no intelligence but a distant God is al- 
lowed above the human head, though living 
creatures in countless gradations are thick 
all the way down to the germ-cell, will 
nothing be missed and nothing be lost 
from the spiritual part of man himself? It 
seems to me impossible. Nature, says 
Leibnitz, never makes a leap; he thereby 
gives as grand a truth to theology as to 
physics. If nature makes no leap from the 
germ-cell to Adam, she makes none from 
Adam to Him who said, "Let there be 
light, " and hangeth the earth upon noth- 
ing. The interval between Deity and us is 
not empty. I think we see increasing de- 
fects in a too terrestrial religion. Little by 
little it is attenuated. Faith is frost-bitten. 
Everything is begrudged to the mind ex- 
cept inquiry and doubt. One doctrine or 
ordinance after another is rationalized. At 
last Jesus Himself is followed rather as a 
leader and reformer of the race, the man- 
liest of men, than as the atoning " Lamb of 



Spiritual Sensibility 71 

God which taketh away the sins of the 
world." Social science cries, " Behold the 
man!" with Pilate, rather than "My Lord 
and my God!" with St. Thomas. Some 
richness and depth of grace, some power 
of prayer, some tender quickness of sensi- 
bility, must disappear when this world be- 
comes more and more, and the other less 
and less. We shall do better — O, how 
much better! — to rise up and lie down, to 
live and walk and worship, to go about 
our daily pastoral work, to preach and 
minister sacraments, as those who "have 
come unto Mount Zion, unto the city of the 
living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to 
an innumerable company of angels, to the 
general assembly and Church of the first- 
born which are written in Heaven, and to 
God the Judge of all, and to the spirits of 
just men made perfect, and to Jesus the 
/Meditator of the New Covenant." 

Finally, do not be discouraged. Humility 
is not discouragement. So far as my read- 
ing and memory go, a keen conviction of 
personal unworthiness has appeared as a 



72 Spiritual Sensibility 

permanent element in the spiritual frame of 
all memorable ministers whose interior life 
has in any way been opened to the world. 
In a very large proportion of cases, that 
conviction has been attended by a deep 
feeling of incompetency to the high calling. 
This would seem to be just as common 
with the most distinguished as the most ob- 
scure. What we call success, celebrity, ad- 
miration, have apparently nothing to do 
with it. I could easily fill up an hour 
with sincere confessions of this sort from 
famous preachers. What could more im- 
pressibly elevate the office of a Christian 
teacher than this solemn undertone of self- 
dissatisfaction, sounding along through the 
whole line of holy leaders from Pentecost 
to this hour, " Not unto us, not unto us" ? 
It is a confession of "that mysterious se- 
cret" which "keeps sweeping from us 
evermore"; an unrealized ideal, an unful- 
filled hope, a grief of shortcoming just as 
sad in the weary heart of the veteran priest 
and soldier who lies down to rest at four- 
score, as in the sobered spirit of the young 



Spiritual Sensibility 73 

deacon at the first anniversary of his ordi- 
nation. We may take it as one of the hu- 
man confirmations of the promise of the 
resurrection — that after death we are to live 
and in some way minister again, where no 
such limitations will close us in, no such 
chains drag at our feet, no such awful 
abyss separate between what we would be 
and what we are. A Christian's despair of 
perfection on earth is a prophecy of his im- 
mortality. 

It ought to be impossible, the Lord being 
forever at the head of His Kingdom, that 
His officers and workmen should be dis- 
heartened. The most solitary missionary at 
the farthest outpost in the darkest continent 
does not work alone. All live and serve to- 
gether in that one Kingdom, in the presence 
of all its powers, under the eyes of its su- 
perhuman agents, sustained by its everlast- 
ing realities. Over them, however it may 
be with the men of this world, it must be 
that the angels of God descend and ascend. 
Above all, in the midst of all, not far from 
any one of His servants, stands the Shep- 



74 Spiritual Sensibility 

herd of all the shepherds, the Light of every 
prophet who teaches, the Advocate of every 
comforter who heals and consoles human 
hearts. He speaks and we hear, " With- 
out Me ye can do nothing." It is the heart 
of Christ that speaks. When Moses and 
Elias had passed out of sight, on the Mount 
of Transfiguration, the disciples saw " Jesus 
only." But He had shown them that the 
veil is taken away and that the gates of 
heavenly glory are not shut, day or night. 



III. 

Self-Sacrifice. 



III. 

SELF-SACRIFICE. 

In the two former conferences it has been 
found that the foremost demand on modern 
Christianity is that of a revival of the spirit 
of self-consecration, which is a spirit of 
sacrifice; and that this renewal of apostolic 
life must be begun and be led, like other 
spiritual revivals in the Church Catholic, by 
a self-sacrificing clergy. This goes to the 
root of all holy obedience, as the Cross itself 
is the symbol and interpreter of the Chris- 
tian faith. 

The truth is sharp-edged. It makes large 
drafts on personal courage, as well as on 
other elements of personal religion. It 
makes religion costly. It is not popular in 
the pulpit; it is less and less so. We hear 
little of it from popular preachers. The 
parochial system succeeds in a certain fash- 
ion without it, and succeeds a good deal in 
smothering it. That, however, is not of 
77 



78 Self-Sacrfice 

great moment to us here. We are near to 
Calvary, and drawing nearer day by day. 
You are not taking for your pattern the 
young ruler who went away sorrowful. I 
gladly believe you want to hear nothing 
less than the whole law of God, and are 
heroic enough to bear the reproach that fell 
upon your crucified Lord. 

Compare the clergy of our own day with 
the clergy of the Pentecostal and Apostolic 
period. Down to the last moment of the 
evangelic history the standard of ministerial 
consecration is not lowered. For example, 
except for condemnation or warning, we 
have no knowledge of any minister there 
selecting his field of labor for its external 
advantages, its income or social privileges; 
none of a clergyman leaving one place for 
another on the offer of superior honors or 
emoluments; none of a clergyman putting 
a money-value at all on his work; none of 
a clergyman shrinking from any task or 
avoiding it or diminishing it on account of 
its hardship; none of a clergyman disparag- 
ing a brother-clergyman to his own better- 



Self-Sacrifice 79 

ment by contrast; none of a clergyman sub- 
ordinating the religious edification or har- 
mony of the Christian body or any part of 
it to his own self-will, or to any scheme, 
opinion, or course of proceeding of his own 
choosing. These things all came in. But 
each one of you young men, candidates for 
the Holy Ministry, speaking from your 
higher manhood no less than from your 
baptismal vow and churchly nurture, will 
say that they came of apostasy ; that they 
do not belong to the original integrity and 
purity of the Kingdom of Christ. 

You will not wish to break the force of 
this affirmation by objecting — tempora 
mutantur. The serious question remains 
whether nos mutamur, and if so, on what 
warrant we are changed. It may be said 
with some force that the early age had no 
parishes like ours, few settled pastors with 
large families, less need of a long and costly 
course of preparatory study, was less pro- 
hibitory as to ministers doing secular work, 
and insisted less on a clergyman's keeping 
up a certain style of living corresponding 



80 Self-Sacrifice 

with that of his well-provided parishioners. 
I look back over my several items of con- 
trast, and I do not see that any of these last- 
mentioned considerations so touches one of 
them as to excuse us from a conscientious 
attention to their moral obligation. With a 
keen sense of ill-desert, I cannot honestly 
allow that for me or for you the old Gospel 
requirement of self-renunciation on the ordi- 
nation threshold can be relaxed in the least. 
I go further, and submit that our modern 
non-conformity to the law of Christ and His 
Apostles in this respect, with all its specious 
excuses and palliations, may probably be a 
cause of the slowness and coldness and 
weakness of the Church, to say nothing of 
the unbelief and carelessness of the world. 
The first recommendation I should make, 
therefore, in this subject is that you should 
form a habit of frequent comparison be- 
tween your own life, as respects self-denial 
or the willingness for it, and that of the 
men whom our Lord chose and sent out to 
represent and preach Him to mankind. 
"The groundwork of all clerical educa- 



Self-Sacrifice 81 

tion," says M. Perraud, a continental stu- 
dent of history and theology, " lies in Holy 
Scripture and the earliest tradition. The 
first laws of our Apostolic ministry have 
not changed since the time when Andrew 
and Peter, James and John, left their nets to 
become fishers of men, and we still seek 
the first rules of ecclesiastical perfection 
among those primitive fathers and first 
councils which breathe the very purest and 
healthiest spirit of Christianity/' 

In the next place, in your preparatory 
self-examinations here, which ought to be 
renewed every day and deepened every 
Lent, it seems to me you should follow the 
New Testament method of measuring, 
arraigning, and judging yourself more by 
absolute and independent principles, how- 
ever conscientious in making the applica- 
tion of those principles, than by literal rules 
or a formal directory prescribing a daily re- 
ligious regimen. I would speak with some 
diffidence on this point, because, though I 
am very sure of the expediency in my own 
case, I am aware that some good men, 



82 Self-Sacrifice 

whose piety I venerate, think otherwise. I 
can profit myself a little, but not very much, 
by these fixed allowances and limitations, 
or by determined degrees of physical priva- 
tion. Thus, for instance, I see that both 
the Gospel and the Church demand that we 
should fast. Fast, then, we must; for 
those are God's teachers, and God knows 
us better than we know ourselves. Truth 
received from Him we must both practice 
and teach; and here as in other places He 
graciously permits us to learn the value of 
His ordinance by its chastening effect upon 
ourselves. But there is another truth. 
There are so many kinds and shapes of per- 
sonal sacrifice, pertaining to other and much 
less manageable parts of my complex con- 
stitution, where I can lay on the cross to as 
good purpose, and where it hurts so much 
more, that the idea of keeping up a state of 
spiritual elevation chiefly by a constant re- 
minder to reduce the amount of bodily 
nourishment — most clergymen's labors be- 
ing what they are — is one difficult to be in- 
vested to me with reality and religious 



Self-Sacrifice 83 

power. It is harder for me to regulate my 
tongue than my palate. I suspect most 
men addicted to studious habits and public 
speech have a more dangerous appetite for 
literary indulgence and the luxury of repu- 
tation than for meat or wine. I do not see 
why we should not believe, if we are in 
earnest at all, that temperaments are meant 
to be unlike in this respect as in so many 
others, and that, as physically one man's 
"meat is another man's poison," so morally 
one man's sufficiency may be another man's 
excess, or one man's fasting another man's 
temptation. Believing this, and seeing that 
the New Testament does not treat the body 
as evil, and, while laying down positive 
law as to the duty of literal fasting does not 
lay down positive law or definition as to 
the mode and extent of the duty, seeing 
that Christianity as a religion is distin- 
guished in this respect from other systems, 
I should yet, on the other hand, be only the 
more scrupulous to put myself in mind 
that the keeping under of the body is 
one of the foremost obligations of the 



84 Self-Sacrifice 

Christian priesthood; that this voluntary 
yoking appertains to every portion of our 
being, imagination and desire, ambition 
and will, as well as outward acts; and 
that no purgation needful to this disci- 
pline should be counted too severe. In the 
words of one who has wisely counselled 
many in our calling, "It is undeniable that 
the Gospel makes it a duty to keep the body 
in a subordinate place, in subjection to the 
soul, in perpetual obedience and fitness to 
be the holy witness of all spiritual actions." 
This law flows out of the supreme central 
fact of the Incarnation — our Lord taking our 
flesh upon Him that our bodies may be made 
clean by His body, and our blood by His 
blood. " We perceive at once that there is 
a pampering of the flesh which is inconsist- 
ent with a holy life. There must be some 
subjugation of the lower part in order to 
keep it from that horrid inversion in which 
appetites and passions acquire dominancy. 
All habits of real self-indulgence are to be 
broken up. We form in our better mo- 
ments the ideal of a life in which character 



Self-Sacrifice 85 

is produced by moderation, temperance, re- 
serve in things lawful, frugality, the cutting 
off of pleasures which are seducing or in 
any degree enslaving." The vessels being 
earthen, we are liable to lower our vocation 
and enfeeble our moral power by too much 
relish for what we eat or drink, by talking 
too much about it, by letting too much be 
made of it in the ordering of time or work 
or in displacing serious duties. I should be 
less than faithful if I did not further express 
my own conviction that piety and the 
Church suffer less from excess in food, 
which nourishes the body, than in narcotic 
luxuries which certainly do not nourish it. 
This may be also the place to say that there 
is a sort of selfishness not generally included 
in this class of sins, but which I think be- 
longs here. It begets more mischief than 
would ever be suspected from anything we 
read, perhaps because some of the laity, 
moved by an honorable sentiment of shame 
for a clergyman who is not ashamed of 
himself, often cover it up and pass it over. 
I mean the sin of running in debt, need- 



86 Self-Sacrifice 

lessly and heedlessly, from mere self-pleas- 
ing and lack of conscience. No man, what- 
ever his gifts or his devotion, can obviate 
that mischief except by stopping the trans- 
gression, and the place to stop it is where 
it begins. We hear frequent warnings 
against church debts — none too frequent. 
But if you knew all there is to be known 
you would consider as even worse than 
those the unreasonable, facile, or chronic 
indebtedness of clergymen in their private 
affairs, exasperating the irreligious and 
bringing religion itself into contempt. 

From these grosser offences pass on to 
notice indulgences less carnal, but still very 
much "of the earth earthy." There are 
not many days in a parish priest's life when 
he has not some direct occasion to illus- 
trate the spirit of his priesthood; to show 
that he knows what the Cross he preaches 
means by putting aside his own tastes or 
convenience for others. In a very nearly 
unerring ratio, how much there is of that 
in his pastoral office, how much prompt 
giving up, — cheerful and manly and unhesi- 



Self-Sacrifice 87 

tating, — for the least attractive or agreeable, 
the least important or influential, the poor- 
est or the worst, so much power and true 
success he has in the long run. It is strik- 
ing to see that so deeply is this vicarious 
idea wrought into human nature itself that 
even the Christless church of the Positivists, 
too proud to call what it believes by its 
Christian name, is yet forced to find room 
for it in its creed, because God has made 
so large a place for it in humanity, and calls 
it altruism. 

An exceedingly thoughtful clergyman, 
eminent before he died, made a practice of 
writing down in his private diary what he 
called "homiletical paragraphs." One day 
toward the end of December he entered 
there what he whimsically called a concio 
ad me ipsum. It runs — "The last Lord's 
Day of the year has arrived, and on review- 
ing your labors you must feel you have not 
stirred up the gift that is in you. Your tal- 
ent, qualiscunque sit, has been too much 
laid in the napkin. You have bestowed 
your time and labor on inferior and second- 



88 Self- Sacrifice 

ary things. One thing is needful. That 
a man is a minister is no token that he shall 
not be cast into hell fire." Elsewhere he 
writes — "The young minister who is evi- 
dently concentrating his chief thoughts on 
something other than his ministry will be a 
drone if not a Demas. He must very likely 
lay his account to forego some part of that 
reputation which comes from erudition and 
literature. Leighton said to some one who 
admired his books, 'One devout thought 
outweighs them all/ Look not at the quie- 
tude, respectability, or refining culture, but 
at the lifelong embassy from the Redeemer 
for lost men. There are legitimate occa- 
sions when a minister may thoroughly re- 
lax his mind, and I hope you will despise 
the sanctimonious prescriptions of those 
who would debar clergymen from any 
summer repose or resort to springs or sea- 
side. Nevertheless in the ordinary minis- 
terial day there should be no hour not de- 
voted to something helpful toward the 
great work. Such are the discouragements 
of a genuine cross-bearing ministry that, 



Self-Sacrifice 89 

without the Master's own spirit of sacrifice 
sooner or later, the dilettante pulpiteer will 
throw off the burden and begin to seek his 
ease, or else preach for itching ears or phon- 
ographic reporters." It will require no 
very strenuous or heroic spirit to go accept- 
ably enough through most of your public 
services ; but it is hard to toil without visi- 
ble returns; to see your most sacred en- 
deavors coarsely handled; to find spiritual 
things profanely criticised; to spend 
wretched hours cheerfully among ignorant, 
unclean, petulant, gossiping, weak-minded 
people. Nothing that I know of will carry 
one graciously and gladly through that but 
the Christ in his heart. 

I say graciously: for in all charities be- 
tween person and person, how much de- 
pends on the manner! and may not Christ 
be in the manner as well as in the heart ? It 
impresses me very much that the larger 
number of complaints which a Bishop is 
obliged to hear made by parishioners 
against their spiritual guides are of this 
character — complaints not of gigantic or 



90 Self-Sacrifice 

damning iniquities, fraud or drunkenness 
or adultery or blasphemy — but of sharp 
speeches, rough and cruel words, impa- 
tience, selfish neglects of the poor or fami- 
lies in humble life, overbearing measures, 
unkind and ungentle manners. Of course 
many of these grievances are imaginary, 
and more of them are too trivial in them- 
selves to be recorded or remembered. But 
let them accumulate and they form a blem- 
ish on the ministerial character. They 
gradually and silently raise a barrier be- 
tween the shepherd and his flock. That 
shepherd is not giving his life for the sheep. 
His fine discourse neither comforts nor per- 
suades. The pastoral tie is weakened. The 
people do not say lovingly in their hearts, 
This man cares for us for Jesus' sake. 

It is hard, undoubtedly, when you are in 
the midst of a train of unusually productive 
thought in your study, which has come 
slowly and by hard pulling of many hours, 
where you feel as if interruption would be 
overthrow, to hear the knock or bell that 
snaps the thread short off, and summons 



Self-Sacrifice 91 

you to listen to the incoherent, stammering 
story of some "foolish body" who may 
not indeed have said in her heart that there 
is no God, but precisely because she be- 
lieves in her heart that there is a God, has 
come to you to get you tell her what God 
is doing with her, and how He can be a 
father to her and to her children when their 
earthly father is a monster: it is hard, and 
it is one of those hardships which you will 
not find the average citizen or the popular 
lecturer or the Saturday Review likely to 
mention when they are flippantly discussing 
the trials or the failures of the clerical pro- 
fession. But if you can meet it gallantly, 
nay more, if you can pass from your books 
and writing-table to this poor woman, cry- 
ing out of the coasts of her Tyre on your 
parish circuit, with anything like the look 
or tone of Him who stopped and listened 
whenever Jew or Gentile beggar besought 
Him, you will be quite as certain to appear 
among His priests and kings hereafter as if 
you had finished out your "happy train of 
thought" in the handsomest fashion, and 



92 Self-Sacrifice 

gruffly told the perplexed parishioner at 
your door to go away and come again at a 
more convenient season. It is hard to see 
your best days for study cut to pieces or 
frittered away ; but one of the most efficient 
city ministers that this country has pro- 
duced, who had a great deal of that sort of 
grief to bear, used to say, "Always tell me 
if any one calls to see me; the man that 
wants to see me is the man that I want to 
see." It is hard to ride over a mountain in 
a storm of a dark night to give the com- 
fortable sacrament to a rich man's servant 
and then be left to pay the hire of the horse 
you drove, unthanked; but there is no evi- 
dence that St. Paul had hard thoughts of 
Pagan masters for not transporting him to 
and fro when he visited their slaves, or ever 
mentioned it to Priscilla and Aquila. It is 
hard to be addressed by a noisy, impudent 
upstart in your parish as if you were a 
huckster; but if you can so manage your 
temper and face and voice as to let him or 
others feel that you belong to an order of 
silent victors, taking their strength from 



Self-Sacrifice 93 

Him who walked on in majesty when the 
rabble cried "Crucify Him," and who stood 
unmoved to be spit upon, you really cannot 
much regret your opportunity. When we 
get well up above our little irritations and 
disputes we have momentary perceptions 
at least of how grand it would be if all of 
us, officers of the great King, went through 
our drudgeries with that easy swing of con- 
scious "power from above" which is as 
far from petulance as it is from fear. 

In the ordination office, where it is set 
forth "to how high a dignity and how 
weighty an office and charge " a priest is 
called, you notice that the title "watch- 
man " is in a group with two others, and 
that they are in a certain order — messen- 
gers, watchmen, stewards. Then follows 
an explication, where teaching and pre- 
monishing are mentioned first, and the busy 
missionary service of seeking and bringing 
in sheep that are scattered abroad is named 
afterward, not as a duty of a separate class 
merely, but as belonging in its degree to 
every Presbyter ordained — "feeding and 



94 Self-Sacrifice 

providing for the Lord's family" not being 
omitted. The meaning is that no part of 
the holy office is rightly discharged without 
the others, and especially that to be a per- 
suasive messenger one must be a stirring 
seeker and a tireless worker. In the early 
Church the exposition or homily was 
joined, through the Gospel and Epistle for 
the day, to the Eucharistic celebration. 
Quite as palpable is the bond in the primi- 
tive system between the preaching and the 
out-of-door travel and everyday visiting 
of the sacred shepherds. There comes a 
temptation, however, which nothing but 
self-sacrifice will overcome. Late at night 
you are in a well-lighted and comfortable 
"study." Outside, the weather is forbid- 
ding. You sophisticate with yourself. You 
say, "To be sure, over the mountain yon- 
der, or out on the marsh, or down in the 
slums, there is a sick woman whose baby 
has scarlet fever and is said not to have 
been baptized; there is a smart hack-driver 
who has lately stopped drinking, and beat- 
ing his wife, and I told her I would come 



Self -Sacrifice 95 

this evening and help her encourage him; 
there are some orphan children that may or 
may not have bread in the morning; there 
are two or three confirmation candidates 
that I should not be so likely to find at any 
other time; there is that contumacious 
vestryman who has got hold of a bit of 
parish gossip, and got hold of it, as usual, 
wrong-end first, and will make more 
trouble with it in twenty-four hours than I 
can set right in a month unless I see him; 
and there is Nora, the washerwoman, who 
is starving for want of work, and she ought 
to know about the place I heard of to-day, 
and so make sure of it to-morrow. But 
no! They can wait. I have here a capital 
subject for an uncommonly interesting 
sermon. Somebody has told me that my 
special talent lies in the pulpit, and I half 
think so myself. There will be several 
hundred people in the church, and they are 
of more account than half-a-dozen unculti- 
vated minds in the outskirts. Preaching is 
a divine ordinance, and must be attended to 
at any rate. I shall be excused if I sit here 



96 Self-Sacrifice 

and write." Of the effect of that dastardly 
sophistry on the man's own soul or its sal- 
vation I am not now to speak. What is the 
judgment passed upon it by the Apostolic 
Ministry ? St. Peter might have reasoned 
in the same way if he had chosen, in his 
room at the house of Simon, the tanner, by 
the seaside at Joppa. What I desire you 
to realize is that the sermon you make 
under those conditions is a sham, as you 
are a sham, and that God does not use 
shams for any permanent or glorious up- 
building of His Kingdom anywhere. Just 
how he will insert debility and failure into 
your ministry you may never know. It is 
enough to know "he cannot deny himself." 
Shirk your pastoral work, your humane 
work, your work of love, for the sake of your 
preaching, and you sap your preaching at its 
root. It was a pathetic but pungent satire of 
a dying lady, poor but polite to the last, who 
was asked in extremis if her clergyman 
should be sent for: "No, I thank you, I 
think not; he has never been to see me in 
these six years since I moved into the 



Self-Sacrifice 97 

parish, and it would be a little awkward to 
have the ceremony of an introduction to 
my acquaintance just as I am breathing my 
last." Quite as good was the remark of an 
older person on her minister's habits: 
"Six days of the week he is invisible, and 
the seventh he is incomprehensible." The 
"invisible" goes to account for the "in- 
comprehensible." 

Another form of self-sacrifice, suggested 
in some of the allusions already made, is a 
voluntary restraint imposed from Christian 
principle on self-will. A serious difficulty 
arises here in discriminating between a 
righteous determination to adhere to a 
chosen course against unjustifiable opposi- 
tion or to maintain an independent stand 
against conflicting parties, on the one hand, 
and a stiff adherence to such a course or 
position because they are ours, and because 
our pride and consistency are involved in 
them, on the other. Conscience and will 
reside in a very near neighborhood to one 
another in some men's natures. We walk 
between two perils. One traitor sells his 



98 Self-Sacrifice 

Master for silver, or favor, or comfort; an- 
other gets angry, deceives himself, sees in 
every opponent an enemy of God, and im- 
agines he is serving Christ when he is only 
having his own way. It would be interest- 
ing if we could lay down on one side those 
parochial disasters which have come about 
by a rector's surrendering right for policy, 
and on the other side those where he has 
fought fatally for a prejudice or a preroga- 
tive. It appears to be greatly for the clear- 
ing up of our doubt and for the rectitude of 
our souls, as well as for the justice and 
safety of our actions in such cases, if we 
can wait awhile, and keep asking, from 
day to day or hour to hour, " How much of 
this zeal is for God, how much for my- 
self?" Time and this scrutiny will both 
help us. God will help us through them. 
There was once a large religious commu- 
nity where various interests were represented 
under a wise head. Three members fell 
into a jealous contention. It was a quarrel 
for official precedence. The matter had to 
be referred to the presiding officer. It was 



Self-Sacrifice 99 

expected without a question that he would 
assign the coveted post of honor to some 
one of the three. I have so often felt his 
judgment to be applicable to a large class of 
our familiar dissensions that I quote from 
it: "The question raised among the three 
persons mentioned in your letter proves too 
plainly that they have all as yet made but 
little progress in the school of Jesus Christ. 
When the Disciples were guilty of disput- 
ing who should have the preeminence they 
were still untaught in the lessons of His 
humility, and had not fully received the 
outpourings of His grace. We who are so 
ready to speak of the spirit of Christ, and 
are called to spread abroad the sweet odor 
of His meekness among men, are utterly 
without excuse if we tolerate in ourselves 
such unworthiness. We ought to blush at 
any symptom thereof. If we judge our rel- 
ative gifts ourselves, or take to ourselves 
the glory of them, we are guilty of en- 
croachment on His divine judgment and 
forestall His sentence. In accordance with 
this principle, binding on all Christians, I 



ioo Self-Sacrifice 

can only condemn all the three partakers in 
this disagreement. Every power commit- 
ted to us by God is to be used for the ad- 
vancement of grace, not of self-will. If 
any one of our members seek to take the 
lowest place in the Gospel Feast, we may 
fairly say to him in Christ's own words, 
'Friend, come up higher.' But it is other- 
wise with those who affect superiority. 
All such we would send to learn of St. Paul 
what was the mind that was in Christ 
Jesus, who being in the form of God made 
Himself of no reputation, and thought it no 
indignity to His Godhead to bear with and 
even to seek out all the humiliations of life. 
I beg all those persons who have had 
thoughts so opposed to the Christian and 
still more to the priestly mind, to repent 
heartily, and to spend a week in special de- 
votions to the humiliations of Jesus Christ. 
I would have them consider that they are 
both Christians and priests, and that they 
ought to esteem these honors more highly 
than any other title or rank." St. Paul lays 
down for us, after a stern rebuke of per- 



Self-Sacrifice 101 

sonal and partisan strifes, the law and the 
motive of all self-sacrifice in our mutual 
relations: "Let every one of us please his 
neighbor for his good for edification : — for 
even Christ pleased not Himself." 

We may follow this law of self-denial 
into a region of questions more subtle and 
perhaps more perplexing. What if I, as a 
teacher, rector, priest, should find myself 
holding some exceptional views on some 
question of belief or practice more or less 
in debate, views which, if I were known to 
hold them, might bring me under suspicion 
or even into trouble with my parish or 
Bishop ? They are views which some per- 
sons share with me; there may be a school 
or party interested in them; I care enough 
about them to wish to promote them ; they 
constitute a "cause"; in that cause there is 
a certain fascination. Other feelings, then, 
are enlisted than that of simple loyalty to 
the Saviour. Then there will evidently be 
a temptation to duplicity. Toward my 
Brethren, toward my Bishop, toward a part 
of my congregation, toward some clear and 



102 Self -Sacrifice 

strong soul that I am afraid of, I might use 
concealment. Keeping back what others 
have a right to know, doing what I should 
be called to account for if it were known, 
and doing it from private fancy or party- 
spirit or self-will, I am first a coward and 
then a deceiver. Let me call your earnest 
attention, gentlemen, to the poisonous in- 
fluence which at this point may threaten the 
soul's health. It is unspeakably worse than 
the mere holding or avowing of any honest 
opinion could be. The first yielding to it is 
one step toward something pernicious. 
What self-sacrifice requires in the case is im- 
mediate and unreserved candor. A clergy- 
man who carries about that sort of secret with 
him, equivocating, giving unreal reasons or 
evasive explanations, carries in his breast 
perilous stuff. He may go very reverently to 
God's altar, but he goes with something 
very like a lie in his right hand. He may 
make clean the cup and platter of ceremony, 
but he bears away a stain on his heart. Be- 
ware of the faintest beginnings of devotional 
duplicity. 



Self-Sacrifice 103 

There remains yet another set of relations 
where the spirit of the Cross finds occasion 
for a most careful and delicate exercise — the 
relations of the clergy with one another as 
fellow-stewards; not only members of the 
same profession, but far more than that, 
workers together under the same Chief 
Shepherd. 

There are different ways of looking at 
this mutual tie. One is the world's way, or 
the political way, contemplating rights 
rather than duties, watching against intru- 
sion rather than for occasions for generosity, 
more anxious to get what the law of the 
Digest allows than to fulfil the law of love. 
It would express itself after this manner: 
" As the head of a parish I am a legal offi- 
cer; as having a living to get and my way 
to make in the world I must be on the look- 
out for my dues, my reputation, my oppor- 
tunities. My clerical Brethren are in a cer- 
tain sense my competitors; if our neighbor- 
hood is very close, it may be that what they 
get I lose — hearers, support, popularity, 
success. They have the same protection 



104 Self-Sacrifice 

and the same chance that I have. Let us all 
take care of ourselves." What type of 
Christian character this doctrine reveals, 
what spiritual tone in a spiritual order, and 
what estimation of it is made by shrewd 
observers, need not be said. There is cer- 
tainly another way. The question with 
you now is which way you will take. I 
think our clergy, over and beyond personal 
attachments, love and respect one another. 
There may be no bitterness, no malice, no 
intentional injustice. Can we say there is 
no evil speaking ? There is a great deal of 
it. We of this profession are of a critical 
habit. As students we are trained to criti- 
cism as an art. There are few ways in 
which self-complacency encourages itself 
more agreeably than by comparisons of 
one's own work with the work of others, 
pointing out blemishes and mistakes that 
appear along the same line of effort with 
our own. Then it is a fashion of the whole 
community to discuss the minister. He is 
the only man who, two or three times every 
week, stands up in the eyes of several hun- 



Self-Sacrifice 105 

dred people who are in the habit of talking 
together, and exhibits before them his per- 
sonal endowments. Like the medical, the 
clerical is a profession talked about. It ex- 
ercises gifts and deals with subjects which 
everybody thinks he understands. There 
is abundant opportunity for comparison of 
merits. As we are placed, subject to this 
publicity, with an unparalleled tax on the 
power of the brain, generally dependent on 
a measure of public favor for any degree of 
success, exposed to the utter unscrupulous- 
ness of domestic and social gossip, I think 
we are severely tried. If a majority of the 
people had sense and religion enough to lay 
the principal stress on the devotional ele- 
ment of the church service, or even on those 
traits of a faithful and godly clergyman 
which are commonly attainable, the case 
would be better. Yet here we are, Provi- 
dence with us, the promises ours, the work 
itself glorious with the glory of our Lord. 
How will you treat that great temptation to 
professional jealousy and disparagement ? 
Will you fall in with the bad custom, or 



106 Self-Sacrifice 

will you establish a custom of magnanimity ? 
Will you condescend to that contemptible 
gossip about other clergymen's talents or 
want of them, their foibles, their blunders, 
their laughable idiosyncrasies? Will you 
swell the stream of this exceedingly small 
talk with all its hurtful and cruel ingredi- 
ents, or will you check it ? Will you make 
it your habit when you speak of a Brother 
to speak what is true and good only ? In 
the frequent prostration of our hearts before 
God when we hear the " Ye who do truly," 
and in opening these hearts frankly to one 
another, ought we not to accuse ourselves 
and make new resolutions? How often 
some clergyman, for the most part irre- 
proachable, without the least intention to be 
calumnious or even unfriendly, when he has 
taken charge of a parish vacated only just 
before, says to his Bishop: "I am trying to 
do something here, but I have found mat- 
ters in a wretched condition — disorder and 
neglect everywhere, families not visited, 
children not looked up, slovenly services, 
some persons alienated, records imperfect, 



Self-Sacrifice 107 

all at loose ends; but I shall try to straighten 
it out after awhile, only give me time." 
Now, that is a species of detraction. If all 
the facts are not just as they are stated it is 
slander, and the slandered brother is not 
there to defend himself; even if they are, 
the manly thing is to go silently to work to 
mend and make and edify, and in due time 
the reformation will appear, and you will 
not lose one jewel in your crown. The 
oddest part of it is that this same doleful 
account has been known to be given of the 
same parish time after time through a series 
of short settlements, till one marvels how it 
happens that through such a succession of 
ruins the parish should not have perished 
outright, or else through such a succession 
of improvements should not have become a 
prodigy of perfection; whereas to outside 
observation it appears to be neither much 
better nor much worse at any time than the 
parishes all around it. It is very seldom 
that a rector taking charge cannot say with 
some truth, if he wants to say it, " Other 
men labored, and I have entered into their 



108 Self -Sacrifice 

labors." We belittle ourselves by little 
judgments; may God forgive us! May He 
give you such heavenly grace that out of all 
your sore battles with self — self-indulgence, 
self-admiration, self-pleasing, self-will, self- 
praise, you may come conquerors and more 
than conquerors, bringing with you in fruit- 
ful abundance, "that most excellent gift of 
charity, the very bond of peace and of all vir- 
tues, without which whosoever liveth is 
counted dead!" 

Almost afraid, my young Brethren, to say 
to you as of myself those more general and 
lofty counsels into which I feel that we 
ought to rise as this short series of instruc- 
tions draws to an end, I borrow two or 
three brief passages from a venerable and 
saintly mind of two hundred years ago. 
"Let us be content to hide ourselves in 
God, until, at our Lord Jesus Christ's last 
coming, all things are revealed. Let us 
freely give Him this world and all that is in 
it, if He will but give us Heaven. The day 
will come when He will show that those 
who have been most prominently seen in 



Self-Sacrifice 109 

His work have not always done the most; 
and sometimes they who are the least 
worthy receive most credit in this life, be- 
cause in His wisdom He does not choose 
that His faithful servants should run the risk 
of having their reward here. It is well to 
be content to be forgotten ourselves, so 
that through us God alone may dwell in the 
hearts of men. If we give ourselves heart- 
ily to our dear Lord, entering into the spirit 
of His Incarnation, then, without losing 
anything of that original attitude, we shall 
go forth as He came forth from the Father. 
We shall apply ourselves to earthly matters, 
hearken to the words of imperfect men, 
learn their languages, and accept rather 
with patience than with self-seeking or 
complacency such application to secular 
studies as is needful for God's glory. But 
in order to do this in holiness, and accord- 
ing to the mind of Christ, we must give 
ourselves wholly to Him, entreating Him to 
keep us free from the spiritual infirmities 
which beset those much given to literary 
pursuits. Our aim must be to live the sim- 



i io Self-Sacrifice 

pie life of faith, ruling our conduct by our 
duties, not by our feelings. The real ne- 
cessity for us in spiritual things is that we 
should be busy in doing, not in looking 
about to see whether we are doing or not. 
Above all things, we must walk before 
God with truth, with a single mind. The 
smallest actions done for God tend to our 
sanctification. He tells us that it is so. 
Never pause to dwell on what you may feel 
in yourself, of weakness or of strength, but 
live on in that simple faith without squan- 
dering your energies or analyzing your 
emotions. Do not imagine yourself to be 
weak because you feel weak, or strong be- 
cause you feel strong. St. Peter believed 
himself to be strong, but was weak; St. 
Paul believed himself to be weak, though 
he was strong. You cannot be free except 
'the Son shall make you free.' Without 
Him you can do nothing. We are not suffi- 
cient to think anything as of ourselves, but 
our sufficiency is of God." 

"Without Me ye can do nothing." Let 
that be the word we all carry away with 



Self-Sacrifice 1 1 1 

us, dear friends, and keep with us to the 
end — a word of warning, a word of Al- 
mighty promise! Let us all say it back to 
Him here, this moment, with our whole 
heart, from the depths of penitence and 
humility, and so say it to the end — With- 
out Thee, O Christ, we can do noth- 
ing! 

These days of comparative seclusion, in 
this Seminary life, are passing away. 
When you have once begun your august 
work, the most blessed refreshments you 
come to will be but Elims, short intervals 
between seas and deserts, between march 
and march, between things behind to be 
forgotten and things before to be attained. 
What is done for you here, what you do 
for yourselves, will all be revealed. It will 
not save you. It may be easily thrown 
away, or lost. Will those you shall min- 
ister to, the souls in your cure, see any mark 
of the cross upon you, any sign in your 
bearing, conversation, preaching, priest- 
hood, life, that you have been taught by the 
Son of God ? Will those you live with see 



ii2 Self-Sacrifice 

it? Will those eyes which are never 
dimmed and never err see it ? 

The everlasting Love be patient with us, 
giving you already the power of an endless 
life, while you look for that blessed hope 
and the glorious appearing of the great God 
and our Saviour Jesus Christ! 



IV. 

The Ministry of the Church a Ministry 
From on High. 



IV. 



THE MINISTRY OF THE CHURCH A MINISTRY 
FROM ON HIGH. 

We assume it to be impossible to exer- 
cise the priestly office thoroughly or to sus- 
tain the prophetic character consistently 
without a distinct apprehension of the un- 
seen world as a "world," not an abstrac- 
tion but a palpable domain peopled. The 
effectual priest, the enlightening and inspir- 
ing prophet, look up steadfastly into a scene 
of living realities, and so look into it that 
they see it opening down into the world of 
realities about them. They live in vital re- 
lations with it. It becomes consciously a 
source of their strength and a secret of their 
peace in all their ministries. What meets 
them there is more than ideas or names, 
images of the mind or creations of its fac- 
ulty. In whatever degree their service 
might be, honest or useful without this 
sense of its being a ministry from on high, 
"5 



n6 The Ministry of the Church 

it would not be, in power or purity, what 
God has offered to His ministers when He 
called them to be His servants or His saints. 
Like other elements of the Christian 
Faith this truth has immediate connections 
with the Incarnation. Christ's coming 
throws the two worlds open to each other. 
Each had its existence in preparation before. 
The Advent removed the screen. The Rev- 
elation was more than a book or a "vi- 
sion." Before the Face of the Son of Man 
the partition-walls melted away. Thence- 
forth the Church below and the Church 
above were to be in intercourse; the officers 
and guides here were to have their commis- 
sion, authority, light, and loftier fellowship 
there. It was to be a prolonged, perpet- 
ual revelation. " Henceforth ye shall see 
Heaven opened." The Ascension is fol- 
lowed by the coming down of gifts ; and 
we are told by what gift-bearers they are 
brought. The loneliest missionary at the 
farthest outpost of Christendom has it for 
his comforting that his companions are "the 
innumerable company." No discourage- 



A Ministry from on High 117 

ments, oppositions, terrors, privations, can 
sunder this communion. Its satisfactions 
are beyond the griefs of fruitless toil, the 
jangle of quarreling shepherds, the alarms 
of heresy, the shame of backsliders and 
traitors. While as ministers we are en- 
gaged about our hallowed work, it matters 
little whether the " audience" is more or 
less. The invisible witnesses are there. 
They worship with us, and we with them. 
It is an incalculable joy. How insignificant 
the prattle of query and comment at the 
church-door, — How many people, or how 
few, were there! 

In its practical habit the human mind has 
never been held very long, or on any large 
scale, in the rare atmosphere of a Platonic 
theism. It will run rather to one of two 
delusions, mythology or materialism. Im- 
agination or the senses will avenge the 
wrong of slighted faith. Within the limits 
of a nominal Christianity the two tenden- 
cies appear, — to a loose fanaticism that 
makes an easy alliance with appetite and 
passion, or to the cynical humility of the 



Ii8 The Ministry of the Church 

agnostic, disclaiming knowledge of Heaven 
so as to make it easy to escape its laws and 
laugh at its sanctities. Out of that Heaven 
descends Christ, declaring that while He is 
here He is there. With Him, around Him, 
are disclosed the forms and features of citi- 
zens of a heavenly kingdom which thence- 
forward is to be a kingdom on the earth. 
He speaks of them and to them as we 
speak of those we know and love, to our 
housemates and neighbors, — ''fellow-citi- 
zens with the saints and of the Household 
of God." And He promises to His work- 
men, watchmen, stewards, messengers, that 
they shall, if they will, be honored with the 
same attendants, defended by the same 
heavenly host, cheered by the same ''min- 
istering spirits " that ministered to Him. 

Once settled therefore in the belief which 
sees no Saviour but the Lord Jesus and sees 
Him continually, adores no God but the 
Father, Son and Holy Ghost, and expects 
no eternal life but by the sacrifice of the 
Cross, we are in a position to open our eyes 
on all the wondrous and inspiring array 



A Ministry from on High 119 

of supersensual verities which encompass 
us. We acknowledge with glad assurance, 
as Catholic piety always has, that " without 
these," saints and angels, mysteries and 
powers "from on high" we in this Church 
of God cannot be "made perfect." 

Nor are the two, the personal Saviour by 
faith in whom we are justified, and the en- 
tire supernatural system made known to us 
in the knowledge and Revelation of Him, 
to be separated from one another. The 
great perversions and mischiefs which have 
arisen under the name of Christianity might 
probably be shown to have been largely 
caused by putting them apart altogether, or 
else by disturbing their proportions to such 
a degree that, first, doctrine was distorted 
and then, as must always happen sooner 
or later, personal character was deformed. 
The two are parts of one whole. The per- 
son Christ, the Mediator, cannot be con- 
templated as detached either from the heav- 
enly places and living activities out of which 
He descended, or from the vast and mighty 
stream of divine forces and influences which 



120 The Ministry of the Church 

were concerned in the purpose of His com- 
ing and became manifest when He was 
manifested. How otherwise could we ac- 
count for the cast of the narrative, not only 
the coloring and allusions of the New Tes- 
tament story but the express recitals and 
averments, the scenery spread before us, 
the superhuman forms presented to us ? Is 
it not remarkable that, in the beginning of 
the Epistle to the Hebrews, where our 
Lord's divinity is affirmed with a majesty 
and explicitness of statement scarcely sur- 
passed in the proem of the Gospel of St. 
John, the preparatory promises of redemp- 
tion are represented as made in the presence 
of celestial orders, the Father enthroned in 
the midst of a peopled universe beholding 
the ranks about Him and recognizing the 
Son as sharing the seat of His sovereignty ? 
Two of the evangelists preface their bi- 
ographical records of the Messiah with par- 
ticular accounts of persons passing and 
speaking beyond the bounds of space and 
time which we call Nature. From the An- 
nunciation to the Ascension we stand be- 



A Ministry from on High 121 

fore opened heavens. Such is the natural- 
ness of the supernatural that most Chris- 
tians of every period, in reading Holy 
Scripture, have felt no more surprise at the 
mention of a messenger from another 
world appearing near the Son of God, or in 
some Apostolic exigency, than at any other 
Biblical occurrence. 

Yet we now meet large numbers and even 
bodies of Christians to whose religious ideas 
and emotions all this higher-world life is 
foreign. Are there not modern multitudes 
from whose convictions and associations, 
and even their sacred seasons and devout 
communings, it all lies off, not exactly de- 
nied but as something legendary or appari- 
tional? Cherubim and Seraphim, all the 
company of Heaven, are sung about, but re- 
garded as only the machinery of a poem to 
be treated as the critics treat the epic super- 
naturalism of Dante and Milton. Has all 
this no effect on practical piety, on worship, 
on the ministry of the Church ? When the 
living glories have vanished from the skies 
or fled beyond them, leaving nothing there 



122 The Ministry of the Church 

but soulless spheres about which science 
disputes whether their frosts and fires per- 
mit any life at all to be in them, when every- 
thing above the Andes and Himalayas, and 
above the human head, is stripped of all in- 
telligence but the Creator's,though countless 
grades and shapes of life run thick all the 
way down to the monad, will nothing be 
lost and missed from the spiritual part of 
man himself, or from the spiritual power and 
efficiency of the priesthood and prophecy, 
of Christ's appointment ? We see increas- 
ing signs of a too terrestrial Gospel, and 
hence of a Church that is less of Heaven 
than of earth. Little by little, faith is frost- 
bitten. Everything is begrudged except 
mental adventure, self-reliance and doubt. 
One or another doctrine of the creed is ra- 
tionalized. At last Jesus Himself is fol- 
lowed rather as a leader and reformer of the 
race, the manliest of men, operating only 
after the human manner of influence, than 
as the Eternal Son " begotten not made," 
the Lamb of God taking away the sin of the 
world as well as turning its night into day. 



A Ministry from on High 123 

Social science cries " Behold the Man " with 
Pilate, not ''My Lord and my God" with 
believing Thomas. Some beauty of holi- 
ness, some power of prayer, some tender- 
ness of spiritual sensibility, will be lacking 
where this mortal life becomes more and 
more, and the other life less and less. What 
if this secular tendency creeps to the pulpit 
and the altar, subtly infecting the guardians 
and teachers sent from on high to lift men's 
conversation heavenward? Why should we 
resort eagerly to a critical and exegetical 
apparatus as uncertain as anything in em- 
pirical or experimental inquiry to get rid of 
what the human heart, after all, in its great 
hunger, so craves that poets bring it back, 
childhood is born to it, and saints grow in 
it as they grow old and grow wise ? We 
shall do better — how much better! — to live 
and worship, go about our daily work, rise 
up and lie down, as those who have "come 
unto Mt. Zion, the city of the Living God, 
the heavenly Jerusalem, and to an innumer- 
able company of angels, to the general as- 
sembly and Church of the firstborn which 



124 The Ministry of the Church 

are written in Heaven, and to God the Judge 
of all, and to the spirits of just men made 
perfect, and to Jesus the Mediator of the 
New Covenant.'' 

It has been observed that in Religion the 
thought of the East and the thought of the 
West start from opposite points and move 
in opposite directions, the Oriental mind con- 
ceiving of God as coming down to man, the 
Western mind of man as struggling up by 
meditation, prayer and discipline toward 
God. However this may be, an actual dif- 
ference appears between two systems of 
religious culture and two corresponding 
styles of the religious life. Why has God 
spoken in the Gospel and the Church ? Our 
answer is, To show us Himself, His Law 
and Love, His Will and Purpose, a Revela- 
tion of His. character. Another answer is 
that Christianity is given to show men what 
they ought to be, how they ought to live 
and may expect to live forever, in safe con- 
ditions and in all their relations. The great 
Reality is dealt with on its divine side or its 
human side. We may busy ourselves either 



A Ministry from on High 125 

with what we have to do, or with what the 
Eternal One has done, is doing and promises 
to do. So it is quite possible to regard the 
Christian Society as prospective, the ideal 
reign of righteousness to be wrought out 
by human agencies and gradual improve- 
ments and to become heavenly only in a fu- 
ture age and state, or otherwise to expect a 
spiritual commonwealth set up here where 
the living forces of a real Heaven above us 
are already in active, ordered and perpetual 
play, forces which we gain and serve by 
looking upward into a world where the Per- 
fect Will is done by an obedient creation, 
where Father, Son and Holy Ghost work 
"hitherto" and evermore, where law is 
love, and out of which powers, helps, in- 
spirations, influences, unseen but mighty, 
actual as any solids or attractions of the 
globe, pass down into believing hearts to 
renew and quicken them, to purify them 
and lift them up. Is it not a matter of 
unspeakable moment to the Christian man 
and woman, to the messenger of Eternal 
Life most of all, whether there is such a 



126 The Ministry of the Church 

world as that or not; whether we believe in 
it or not; whether we live as if we believed 
in it or not ? 

Without doubt, there is at present in the 
popular mind, spoken or unspoken, this an- 
swer: — That world of unseen personal life, 
if actual at all, lies apart from our practical 
interests and our appointed work where we 
are now. What is wanted of men, it is 
insisted, is visible usefulness. We are on 
the human plane, and we have a plenty to 
do here; what other plane there may be is a 
matter of speculation. Whether there is an 
"immaterial" sphere or not, is immaterial 
to us. The Spirit we believe in is "the 
spirit of the age." 

That objection, however, is only a phase 
of a larger issue, involving, as I believe, the 
fact of Religion, the source of character, the 
definition of what is practical, and the 
limits of human power, as well as the 
authority of the Bible and the Church, and 
not less at last our moral integrity in con- 
tinuing to use words and perform acts 
which mean that we believe in that au- 



A Ministry from on High 127 

thority. What is of man tends powerfully 
to crowd upon and finally to crowd out 
what is from above man. Fixing attention 
here on the notion that, as an element in 
Christian character, faith in the superhuman 
is impractical, we appeal not to theory but 
to history and biography, i. e., to fact. 
The Church has its commemorative liter- 
ature, its All Saints' Day, its Martyology, 
its Hagiology, and its living representa- 
tives, throughout Christendom, of the Faith 
of Christ, if the Faith of Christ is a thing to 
be defined and identified. Studying this 
evidence, shall we be led to any such con- 
clusion as that righteousness on the earth 
suffers from a conscious communion with 
the Spirits in Heaven ; that the kingdom of 
Christ loses energy or the fruit of good 
works by a sense of immediate relation to a 
Heavenly Society, or that the signal leaders 
of the civilized forces of society have been 
less in stature or in power for ascribing their 
strength to palpable influences coming- 
down to them from beyond the fields of 
their action and their understanding ? Take 



128 The Ministry of the Church 

for instance the figure of the Reformer who 
nearly 800 years ago arose in the confusion 
and semi-barbarism of western Europe, and 
has stood ever since as the delivering and 
directing mind in that perilous age of the 
life of the Church, St. Bernard,— of whom an 
English Protestant historian says that he 
was "at once the leading and the governing 
Head of Christendom," and whom a very 
different authority, Baronius, who ended his 
Ecclesiastical annals with the period which 
Bernard created and fashioned, describes as 
"the ornament and support of the whole 
Catholic Church and preeminently the honor, 
glory and joy of the Church in France." Is 
it easy to name a master-workman more 
sagacious, a ruler more mindful and more 
skilful in every detail of management and 
administration, more shrewd or comprehen- 
sive in planning or more direct and prompt 
and untiring in executing every economy 
save war, more admired and trusted in af- 
fairs, more influential among statesmen, 
more feared in courts ? Has there been, 
since St. John and St. Paul, a believer, a 



A Ministry from on High 129 

theologian, a preacher, a saint, more thor- 
oughly and ardently intimate than he with 
Persons beyond the annals of time and 
space and the powers of the world to come 
than this devotee or Churchman? Is this 
practical ? Hear, then, this passage, found 
in the first volume of his works: "The 
land which the soul of the saint inhabits is 
not a land of forgetfulness. Brethren, the 
amplitude of Heaven does not contract the 
heart but dilates it. Even those superior 
Spirits who have dwelt in Heaven from the 
beginning, do they, because inhabiting 
Heaven, look with disdain upon the earth ? 
Do they not rather visit and frequent it ? 
Does affection fail in their Unity because 
they see always the face of the Father? 
Rather are they not all ministering spirits 
sent forth to minister to those who have the 
heirship of salvation ? Shall angels go 
abroad and succor men and not know how 
to sympathize with us ? " So real to him was 
this intercourse with the celestial sphere 
that, as it is reported of him, one day 
when his vision of divine things was un- 



130 The Ministry of the Church 

usually clear, he rode from morning till 
evening along the shore of Lake Geneva, 
and at nightfall did not know that the 
water with its surpassing beauty and mar- 
velous reflections had been in sight. 

We must believe there can be no 
strong or successful " church- work" except 
through a conformity of mind to the settled 
spiritual laws. Our Lord must have spoken 
not only of the continuity but of the princi- 
ples and methods of the service when He 
admonished His followers, "My Father 
worketh hitherto, and I work." If there is 
a prevalent decay of the highest type of 
saintly living, that is of holy living, it must 
come from a loss, conscious or otherwise, 
of faith in the supernatural verities of the 
New Testament, verities without which 
there certainly is no New Testament. It 
should not be deemed presumptuous to 
confess a conviction, in view of all the 
past, that the future advance if not the 
preservation of what we know as Chris- 
tianity depends on a healthy revival of 
that faith, as against a base materialism on 



A Ministry from on High 131 

the one hand and a loose popular compound 
of serious individualism and a shallow sub- 
jective sentimentalism on the other. The 
latter alone might keep a hold on a certain 
class without belief in any personal exist- 
ence intermediate between man and his 
maker. But let that faith in a superhuman 
kingdom, a sphere of which God is Creator 
and Centre, but including also superhuman 
beings besides Him with superhuman min- 
istries belonging to them, die out however 
gradually or silently, and the whole fabric 
of our Christian worship, as to its language 
and form, is thenceforth a solemn unreality. 
Unreality in the name of piety is the begin- 
ning of death to piety and morality both, as 
our day needs to remember. Except so far 
as the faith in question has been kept in the 
Church Catholic it has been sliding out at 
the pressure of a hard, impatient and irrev- 
erent rationalism, for three or four genera- 
tions. This decadence would be less ad- 
monitory than it is if there were not reason 
to apprehend that the same tendency threat- 
ens the Body where the notes of Catholicity 



132 The Ministry of the Church 

remain. Of course, unorganized piety will 
continue to exist, man being a religious 
creature by constitution, even where the 
Divine System is disused or misunderstood, 
as a moving body will run on after the mo- 
tive-power has been detached or has ceased 
to act. But it is a slackening and expiring 
movement. If that belief ebbs away, then 
Scriptures, creed, anthems, become the per- 
ishing signs of a pretence, surviving if at 
all not by their inherent vitality but by a 
mere conservative habit or prudential in- 
stinct. 

The terms " natural " and "supernatural" 
are used for convenience as signifying suffi- 
ciently what is meant to be conveyed. Till 
rather recently their correctness has scarcely 
been questioned. Discussions of the nature 
of miracle and its evidential value have 
turned attention to the limits of that which 
both physical and theological science have 
known as nature and its laws, the query 
arising whether miracle itself may not lie 
within those limits. Assuming nature to 
include the whole visible field of divine 



A Ministry from on High 133 

operation, miracle becomes only one of its 
forms. Accepting, for instance, the su- 
preme fact of the Incarnation it might be 
said that nothing could be more strictly 
natural than that the Son of God, coming 
forth out of the heavenlies, should be ac- 
companied throughout His earthly ministry 
by a manifestation of powers, events and 
living beings not belonging to the scene in 
which we now live. To a wide and high 
vision of the universe there would be a fit- 
ness in such a harmony of the inner and 
outer worlds and their economics as would 
at once raise reverence and satisfy the mind. 
The Evangelical truths, so far as they per- 
tain to human life here and hereafter, have 
their countersigns on the face of the earth 
and sky and sea. Something more than 
their analogues or likenesses is in their phe- 
nomena, and in the structure of their organ- 
izations. So the most penetrating intellects 
and finest generalizations have discovered. 
The grand prophetic voices have proclaimed 
the secret. The unity of which seers have 
been sure is a oneness not only of systems, 



134 The Ministry of the Church 

races, nations, beliefs, but of the seen 
universe with the unseen. We must admit 
the imperfection of language as a medium 
of thought or as an instrument of treating 
divine mysteries, much more as a means of 
communication from the Infinite Spirit. 
Happily in its actual use it answers its 
purpose. The words "supernatural" and 
"superhuman " may continue to serve inter- 
changeably without much misunderstand- 
ing. 

It is asked, perhaps, why take pains to re- 
affirm this supernatural element in our Faith 
just now? Because there is so much to 
show that the entire matter, in religious 
bodies with which we are conversant, has 
dropped so amazingly out of mind. There 
would be a startling disclosure, it seems to 
me, if a sharp analytical cross-examination 
were had of what is called by courtesy the 
Scriptural and Evangelical Orthodoxy still 
holding the Bible in its hand, as to its real 
belief in an open Heaven, in an angelic 
world, in substantial living forces playing 
over steadily from the unseen spheres, good 



A Ministry from on High 135 

and bad, to influence our life here, and in 
the communion of saints. With some 
guiding minds that lead that way the steps 
are so soft and slow as to be well-nigh im- 
perceptible. One gets tired of sermons and 
religious books which treat religion only on 
its human side, (and are popular for that 
reason,) from which the great supernatural 
verities are banished. They starve and dwarf 
the spiritual life, substituting self-reliance for 
reverence, self-satisfaction for humility, and 
egotistical noise for silence with God. It is 
one thing to keep an Article in the tra- 
ditional forms of our belief, letting it lie 
there as we let disused furniture lie in a 
garret; and another thing to believe it. We 
Churchmen make much of the Apostles' 
Creed: but do we hold the intermediate 
Articles as vitally and definitely as we hold 
the first one and the last? We have a 
Michaelmas in the Calendar; but a good 
many seem hardly to know what to do 
with it. If the Bible is the religion of 
Protestants, then picking and choosing in 
the Bible is hardly for Protestants a religious 



136 The Ministry of the Church 

employment. Open the Book at any page 
you will, you read but a little way before 
you meet some messenger from beyond the 
stars and suns. Interwoven with all the 
story of things and persons and nations 
earthly, runs, like warp in woof, another 
story, just as vivid, plain, positive, con- 
spicuous, just as free from strain or 
uncertainty or artifice, — a story of the 
Heavenly. These personages are part of a 
most actual scenery; they are met in com- 
mon houses and streets, at tent doors, by 
the banners of armies, in solitudes of deserts 
and in market-places, by camp-fires and in 
the noonday sun. They appear in bi- 
ography and prophecy, in history and 
psalm. There is no crevice where you 
can run in your critical knife between 
nature and the supernatural, in the writing, 
in the web of events, any more than you 
can draw a visible line between the visible 
earth and sky. "He maketh His angels 
spirits, and His ministers a flame of fire." 
There they are, you Bible Christian! When 
Christ is to appear in flesh and be born, 



A Ministry from on High 137 

these visitants announce His Advent, move 
about His mother, and talk with her. A full 
chorus of them shake this earthly air with 
their hymn. They are never far from Him. 
As they were a necessary part of the envoy 
of His Incarnation, they answer His call, 
and having done His bidding, disappear. 
They guard His sepulchre after He has 
risen. They attest the special miracles of 
His Apostles. The New Testament, to the 
end, never forgets them. In every quarter 
where you would expect to find any light 
on spiritual facts, you behold a spiritual 
world, peopled with organized life, open, 
and kindred to our own. 

We have our refreshments when we need 
them. Failing in the ministry, and as we 
very often think, laboring to little pur- 
pose, the dry soul has her refreshment, and 
we are able to hold on our way. 

Practical materialism being the spiritual 
pestilence of our time, faithful workmen 
and witnesses must be anxious to secure 
to themselves every provision of spiritual 
health. Materialism is not to be associated 



138 The Ministry of the Church 

altogether with coarse sensualities, high 
feeding and hard drinking and florid living. 
It goes with calculating and enterprising 
brains and a fastidious culture. Materialism 
may fast and keep vigils for a prouder for- 
tune, for an ampler store of knowledge, for 
a larger draught of the nectar of mortal de- 
light. Not even do men build and spin 
and traffic and travel in the lower sphere, 
but even their least sordid ambitions find 
an exhilarating impulse and a splendid 
career far on this side of eternal things. 
Materialism invites the masters of art, the 
kings of commerce and the captains of 
industry to its table, and they all sit down 
together, saying no grace. 

Granted that the popular religion of the 
day may speak of other satisfactions. It 
does this. The popular religion ornaments 
its temples, rings its bell, preaches its dis- 
courses. It even summons two venerable 
witnesses, the Bible and Sunday ; testifies 
sincerely, and it may be eloquently, to a past 
redemption, an ethical righteousness and a 
post-mortem salvation, telling its "audi- 



A Ministry from on High 159 

ences " that Christianity is a developed ad- 
junct of secular education. What wonder 
if it does more for the schoolhouse than 
the sanctuary, and instructs tempted men 
and women that they are to make them- 
selves good just as they make themselves 
knowing or famous, by their own will- 
power on the human plane ? What if they 
are bidden to go back as far for the Saviour 
and His kingdom as for their Greek text- 
books and beyond the grave for an open 
Heaven ? What if the best outlook of a 
Christian is to feel and to fight, unvisited 
of the heavenly host in this life and try to 
get into a better by and by ? What if the 
visible and invisible domains are kept as far 
apart as Brahm from the Indian hut, or 
Olympus from the Athenian agora ? What 
if the "Communion of Saints " is a senti- 
mental exaggeration, the empty echo of an 
antique superstition, the "Kingdom of 
Heaven " not being of Heaven at all, but 
only a frame of our better moods and hap- 
pier experiences ? How could we marvel 
then if this " religion " should prove to be 



140 The Ministry of the Church 

either a fugitive and intermittent possession 
or an improved moral philosophy formed 
on New Testament maxims, and our 
" Christian walk " a kind of half-evangelized 
decorum instead of an open-eyed and stead- 
fast march looking up ever with a sursum 
corda gladness into that which is within 
the veil, or sitting already in " heavenly 
places " with St. Paul, having the daily life 
close-knit and " hid with Christ in God " ? 

It is easy to find fault But if the fault 
is really there we had better find it, or else 
it will find us, and we shall starve because 
we will not "look unto the hills," and faint 
because we will not fill our pitchers from 
the upper springs. Must it not animate us 
to know of the nearness of a Home of 
boundless Love ? And love is never an ab- 
straction. Love is personal. If Love lifts 
us, it is above us. There is no self-eleva- 
tion. The saving strengths, the regener- 
ating waters, stir "from on high." "Ye are 
from beneath, I am from above." When 
He says "Ye" He means all of us, yet in 
the "natural" life and under its rule. 



A Ministry from on High 141 

When He says "I" He takes in with Him 
the entire sum of His recovering and re- 
deeming powers, His life, sacrifice, church, 
ministry, sacraments, intercession. The 
movement reaches down, opens out, lays 
hold, seizes soul by soul, unfolds its gra- 
cious mysteries, gathers fishermen and 
scholars, publicans and Pharisees, slaves 
and monarchs, little children and veteran 
soldiers, and lo! the kingdom of heaven on 
the earth has come. The two worlds are 
opened into one another, and they stand 
open. We walk on this planet in a glori- 
fied landscape and are at home in it. There 
is more over our heads than below them. 
Angel-forms are in the air, not a whit the 
less actual for being invisible. There need 
be no more doubt about it than when the 
shepherds saw the shining, and heard the 
hymn. To a disciple with this most rea- 
sonable faith, life can never be tame or 
commonplace any more. The drudgeries 
of the hardest lot, the straying flocks in 
the wildest pasture, to parishioner and pas- 
tor, are always in transfiguration. They 



142 The Ministry of the Church 

are kindred with a household of light with- 
out strife or suspicion, or failure, or dis- 
couragement, or fear. Every task is better 
done. The intellectual mastery is firmer 
and more tranquil. Manliness is manlier, 
womanhood is lovelier, for this conscious- 
ness of celestial relationships, this full and 
cheerful assurance that we "are come," 
come already, by the faith and power of 
the descended and ascended Son of Man, 
"to the heavenly Jerusalem, to an innumer- 
able company of angels, to the spirits of 
just men made perfect, and to God, the 
Judge of all." 

It matters nothing to reply that the indi- 
vidual members of that Superior Society 
are obscure to sight, that there is no sensible 
intercourse, and that save the Three Ineffa- 
ble Persons we call on none of them by 
name. Though I should recognize no par- 
ticular angel, yet I believe in the angels none 
the less. I believe in the Syrian people 
without knowing a Syrian man. It is not 
Gabriel or Abdiel perhaps that I think of, 
but there is the great Choir that cry aloud 



A Ministry from on High 143 

to their Creator, that I respond to in the 
Benedicile, that I join with in the Benedic 
Anima, and find very near me the ceaseless 
" Therefore with angels and archangels and 
all the company of heaven." For one, if I 
did not so believe, and so warm and feed 
my faith in all the things declared from on 
high, I would shut my Bible and my Prayer- 
book together; I would go to the shelter- 
less tabernacle of the altruists; I would say 
my Credo Non with honest skeptics and 
repeat the gloomy ritual of downward- 
looking silence at the graves of those I love. 
For it does come to that. It is a singular 
idea of the Universe, — that except the Deity 
all the way up above our heads there is no 
form of personal life. In sheer matter this 
globe is a speck, of well-nigh unutterable 
insignificance. Look at an astronomical 
chart; it hangs a mote in the star-dust of 
the clouded sky. To limit the numbers 
and scope of all living things to those that 
are, or have been or shall be, born and 
buried in its geologic strata would be very 
much the rationalism of a thinking insect 



144 The Ministry of the Church 

that should conclude there are no loftier vital 
shapes anywhere than those which creep 
on its particular leaf or filament of moss. 
Science is insulted by a theory that so 
dwarfs creation and sterilizes its fields. 

" Great God, I had rather be 

A pagan, suckled in a creed outworn, 

So might I, standing on some pleasant lea, 

Have glimpses that might make me less forlorn, 

Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea, 
And hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn." 

Creation is a consistent whole. If we 
see that certain parts of nature not only in- 
dicate but prophesy certain other parts for 
the rational interpretation of their own 
meaning and for the working of the total 
plan, then looking from those other parts 
in the right quarter the eyes of science will 
be sure to find them. Now the extremes 
are easy to see, — the lowest form of inor- 
ganic matter at the one end, and the Su- 
preme Mind at the other, — for in this line 
of thought a personal creatorship is as- 
sumed. Whereabouts, between these two 
ends, is man ? Beginning at the bottom of 



A Ministry from on High 145 

the scale and moving up, whatever may 
be left uncertain a fact that stands out con- 
spicuous and undisputed after observing 
the objects individually is the fact of grada- 
tion. Things unequal in complexity and 
capability are yet things in order. The in- 
equality in use or dignity runs in gradually 
rising degrees from the bottom. Science 
may be baffled at many a puzzle. She may 
be driven to conjecture on an hypothesis 
where she longs to affirm. She may speak, 
as I have heard her on the lips of one of the 
most eminent and eloquent of naturalists, 
with something like impatient disappoint- 
ment, of her failure to discover, after 
twenty years of unremitting study of the 
origin of life, the secret hidden in the egg 
of a tortoise, — as helpless before that as the 
egg itself. With her most penetrating anal- 
ysis she can only see, note, sort and clas- 
sify; but always the things are in order. 
Be it by the self-unfolding of an inworking 
tendency or by the arrangement and addi- 
tion of a Hand as it were ab extra, the 
sorts are never very far apart. Rank by 



146 The Ministry of the Church 

rank they mount up toward man. All 
along, too, as you ascend, you have signs 
of anticipation, of something beyond, of a 
loftier kind of creature than you see. A 
voice out of the rocks, out of the sea, out 
of the slime of sleepy pools, out of the 
clefts of the wilderness, out of the eagle's 
nest at the top of the forest, cries ever 
"one cometh after me mightier than I." 
From lowest to highest major and minor 
prophets foretell Adam and his sons. 
Given the lowest, the higher must be. 
To stop short of the highest would be to 
mutilate deplorably the integrity, the unity, 
the majesty, of a Creation set in order from 
the beginning, redeemed by the "Word 
made flesh. " 

It would be easy to extend these lines of 
devout and thankful thought on sure and 
luminous pathways. Here they are only 
pointed to as Revelation and Reason open 
them, for the possible encouragement of 
some of those Brethren who are either in 
anxious preparation and discipline for the 
Sacred Calling, or are in its solemn trials 



A Ministry from on High 147 

and august endeavors. For on the flattest 
and driest plains of daily duty we can 
"look unto the hills whence cometh our 
help." Over every valley of despond 
stretches the Heaven of God. In the Infi- 
nite Presence hill and valley are equally 
near to Him who is the Son of Man, and 
who wills that where He is there shall His 
servant be. 



V. 

Thorough Service. 



V. 

THOROUGH SERVICE. 

The causes of failure in Church work are 
the same precisely with the causes of fail- 
ure in house work, shop work, or any 
other right work that is done in the world 
— want of conscience, want of energy, 
want of system, want of patience, want of 
discipline, want of will — in a word, want 
of thoroughness, The woman who keeps 
a well-ordered house will, just because she 
is orderly, be helpful and efficient in visit- 
ing the poor, in the parish guild, the sew- 
ing school, the Auxiliary, the Girls' Friendly 
Society, the sisterhood, the hospital. Slack- 
ness and carelessness in the one place will 
be slackness and carelessness in the other. 
What we call character is one thing, all 
round the globe; and it has only one root — 
the perfect life of Christ our Lord ingrafted 
in the soul. 

The question might be asked, how it 
15 1 



152 Thorough Service 

happens that special and frequent atten- 
tion is lately given to the Church work of 
women rather than of men, and so how 
we happen to be here this morning. It cer- 
tainly is not because, in the past, work for 
the Church has not been done by women, 
all over the country. In the Diocese where 
I have charge, including nearly one hundred 
and fifty congregations, many of them mis- 
sions yet, but most of them organized par- 
ishes having wardens and vestries, both 
the original Church life and the survival of 
it from year to year are owing to women. 
The first services were often called for and 
held, the places of worship were provided, 
the comforts and decencies and not merely 
the decorations were furnished, the money 
was raised, the church buildings were put 
up (often very slowly) and the clergy have 
been paid, by the ingenuity, zeal and toil 
of women. You will not understand that 
men have done nothing, or that I undertake 
to estimate exactly the proportion of credit 
due to the one sex or the other. I mean 
that except for the female capacity and 



Thorough Service 153 

resolution, prudence and sacrifice, which 
have been actually brought to bear, more 
than one-half of these flocks would never 
have been gathered, or would have been 
scattered and lost. And this statement is 
not so general but that, taking up the list 
of parishes, I can put my finger on the 
names of scores of them that, without this 
kind of female leadership, would have per- 
ished, especially outside of the cities and 
large towns. Some of you would be en- 
tertained at the shape and manner of these 
volunteer services. I recall the example of 
one woman, unmarried, who having waited 
from week to week for some unbusiness- 
like vestrymen to fulfil their promise, har- 
nessed her father's farm-horse into a lum- 
ber-wagon, drove to a village some miles 
away, and brought home a load of window- 
sashes for the completion of the chapel. 

Why is this not as honorable, as saintly, 
as what is told in the old legend of St. 
Marina, the hermit's daughter, who went 
from the Eastern monastery in the desert 
with a wagon and oxen to the shores of 



154 Thorough Service 

the Red Sea to cart supplies for the monks ? 
A wife without property in one place, and 
the daughter of a farmer in another, each 
almost entirely alone, not long ago carried 
successfully through, without debt, the 
erection of an attractive sanctuary. Nearly 
every form of industry and economy 
known to the invention and fingers of 
maidens and matrons is constantly in use 
to rear or repair churches, or to keep the 
doors from being shut. At this moment a 
band of young girls is prosperously busy 
in paying off a heavy parish debt, not of 
their own making, at the rate of several 
hundred dollars a year. What is true in 
Central New York is doubtless as true in 
other parts of the country. It will hardly 
do then to treat this idea of "woman's 
work" in the church with surprise, as a 
recent discovery, or to go into sentiment 
about it as a fresh experiment, still less to 
be proud of it anywhere as a local pre- 
eminence. 

In fact, it is out of that somewhat artifi- 
cial appearance of it, which I think the 



Thorough Service 155 

matter before us is in some danger of put- 
ting on, that I take the direction of what I 
have now to say. Each of us, in one way 
or another, must tell his own story. If I 
can be of any use to you at all it is by a 
frank utterance of convictions which a seri- 
ous experience has forced into prominence 
in my mind. 

This question respecting woman's work 
must have come up either because it is 
found that more of it ought to be done 
than has been done hitherto, or else because 
there is an impression that there is some 
unpublished secret pertaining to it, some 
mystery in the art of it, or some novelty to 
be proposed in the method of it. Frankly, 
then, I tell you that neither by history nor 
by observation do I find or believe that 
there is any such thing. You will accom- 
plish solid usefulness, enlarge your range 
of sympathy, and ennoble your own life 
wherever in the order of Providence you 
are living it, you will dignify your woman- 
hood and contribute something satisfactory 
to the kingdom of Christ and His charity, 



156 Thorough Service 

not at all by means of anything wonderful 
to be read in any book, or heard in any 
lecture, or proposed on the platform of any 
Convention. It will be, if at all, by looking 
clearly at your little service under the same 
old familiar daylight of common sense that 
guides you on all other right lines, and by 
taking it up with the same reasonable and 
patient and homespun principles that you 
take with you when you go about any 
undertaking — where you want very much 
to succeed. 

Here, for instance, close by you, in your 
own village or city, are a thousand women 
— say young women — with not much to 
do, mostly of one class, and that the class 
to which you belong; you meet some of 
them in society, call on them and receive 
them, talk with them on a variety of topics, 
notice their manner of living and pass upon 
it, I hope, no sharp personal judgment. 
They are perhaps your house-mates, your 
relatives, your friends. When these per- 
sons hear anything said on Sunday at 
church about Church work, there flits cas- 



Thorough Service 157 

ually across their minds — and vanishes — 
an unreal, indistinct image. It is formless, 
colorless, with a hazy outline, no filling-in 
of living figures or warm tints. They have 
themselves no part in it, no concern for it, 
no notion of it. It comes in among the 
notices given out before the sermon, not to 
be thought of again till it is repeated in the 
same place. It is like the Thirty-nine Arti- 
cles in the Prayer Book; it belongs there no 
doubt, but it lies off in another sphere; 
their clergyman knows about it; and they 
remember a few acquaintances supposed to 
be of an abnormal temperament who attend 
to such things as an idiosyncrasy. If they 
are asked to give something at the offertory 
for an orphan-house, or a hospital, or a 
city mission, there is a transient vision of a 
tidy room somewhere, with closets and 
shelves full of pretty garments for children 
and folded pillow-cases, watched over by a 
sister with a white cap and cross — this 
picture having no possible relation to any 
actual aching flesh or poisoned blood, or 
quivering nerves or hungry mouths. It is 



158 Thorough Service 

only the illustrated page of a romantic fic- 
tion — the curiosity-box of a sacred museum. 
You understand perfectly well that this is 
all that these women close by you, made 
just as you are made, know or care to 
know about Church work. With some 
of them the whole circle of Christian re- 
sponsibility is bounded by the walls of 
their houses. Some of them are intellec- 
tual, but intellectually selfish, and they seek 
literary or artistic luxury as epicures seek 
game and wine. Some of them are simply 
frivolous, but selfishly frivolous, living for 
some periodical stimulus of the nervous 
tissue, with ghastly intervals of restless dis- 
content for the moving pageant of the 
streets or the play, the jewelry, the flattery. 
Many of them are living as they were 
brought up to live, and are not much more 
to be condemned than the debased girls of 
Circassia. Their nearest approach to the 
life of Christ on the earth is a repetition of 
the Creed with a graceful obeisance at His 
Blessed Name, and the saying of some 
prayers, with as much meaning left in 



Thorough Service 159 

them as there is sweetness in the rose laid 
last summer in the leaves of the Prayer 
Book. These women are not here with 
you; they never are; but you know them. 
Would it be strange if your Lord and 
theirs, were He to come among us here 
this morning, should inquire of you con- 
cerning them ? They have never crossed 
over from their world, where every season 
they are less sincere, less generous, less 
pure (I was going to say less happy, but of 
what sort of consequence will it be to them 
before the Throne of Judgment whether 
they were happy or not?) they have never 
crossed over to this other world where you 
come to think about your Christian work 
and ask for strength and grace to do it more 
thoroughly than you ever have hitherto. 
But is it certain that none of them can be 
brought over? Are you sure that, among 
those special faculties and gifts which God 
lent you when He made you a woman, 
there is none that was meant to be used 
for just that purpose? Are you sure that 
among those poverty-stricken hearts, those 



160 Thorough Service 

affluent paupers, those perfectly-dressed 
slaves of a despotic society, there may not 
be one to whom God has entrusted you 
with an errand and a message ? You con- 
verse on many subjects; you study more or 
less the art of talking; might you not so 
apply it that somebody should learn from 
you that this other world of charity exists 
and has attractions; of care for the poor, of 
thought for women in Asia and Africa 
brutalized, of sewing garments for orphans, 
of nursing the sick who have neither medi- 
cine nor a bed, nothing to palliate pain or 
ease a cough or rest the back; of sending a 
cordial or a slice to some overtaxed and for- 
saken wife wasting under what a brilliant 
Frenchwoman calls "the august martyrdom 
of maternity " ? In other words, are we to 
go on in the narrow prejudice that all hun- 
ger and nakedness and misery are physical 
and material — that the only people needing 
the gifts of Christian mercy are on the 
squalid margins or at the dregs of society — 
outcasts, negroes, Indians, the fatherless, 
the diseased; that we have no moral India 



Thorough Service 161 

or China among the opulent or refined; 
that there is no Church work to be done in 
your own class: that it is not just as good 
service to the Master to bring a new worker 
into His vineyard as to lift up the lost? 
May not this be your thorough work? 
Some of you have an apostleship to intelli- 
gence and property. Because you are a 
woman, you fulfil that ministry better than 
men, and in some respects better than 
clergymen, for God has given you delicacy 
of perception, tact, and the power which 
goes with the art of pleasing. 

It will be said this mission to the rich is a 
hard work; it is taking up the cross. To 
that we only answer, Is it possible that any 
woman really in earnest has imagined that 
she could follow Christ, do His work and 
know His will, without taking up a cross ? 
Have you looked for a kind of service to 
Him and His people which costs nothing, 
or nothing but money, or the work of the 
hand ? We are inquiring about Thorough- 
ness, and the work that is thorough is that 
which is done where it is needed most. 



1 62 Thorough Service 

The most natural division that can be 
made of church workers makes two classes: 
— 1, those who propose to separate them- 
selves entirely from domestic life, or any 
ordinary occupation, giving their whole 
time to some kind of charity and devotion, 
and 2, those who continue to live in what 
we may call the normal relations, i. e. f as 
members of families, or boarders perhaps, 
having their own private pursuits or house- 
hold employments, yet appropriating a part 
of their time and attention — some more 
and some less — to these charitable and reli- 
gious interests. The distinction is obvious 
enough; but in the difficulties encountered, 
and in the discipline required, it turns out 
to be in practice even a wider distinction 
than might be expected. 

First of all it is to be clearly understood 
that, as to merit, or honor, or credit, there 
is between these two classes no distinction 
whatever, no preference, no superiority of 
the one over the other. As before God, 
infinitely Holy, the Searcher of hearts, we 
know nothing of any deserving or degrees 



Thorough Service 163 

of deserving. We only know that all alike, 
one with another, looking up to the Great 
Throne of Judgment, we can claim nothing 
but compassion, forbearance and pardon. 
There have been times and communities 
where both women and men who have seg- 
regated themselves from common society to 
follow a life exclusively confined to prayer 
and alms deeds were venerated as the fa- 
vorites of Heaven; they were set into a 
place of peculiar exaltation. In the feeling 
and the literature of those periods or schools 
of Christian thought this estimate of the 
members of Christian orders, generally tak- 
ing the three vows of poverty, chastity 
and obedience, was well-nigh universal. It 
tinged Christianity itself with a distinctive 
hue. In the reaction, as generally happens, 
Protestant opinion has swung with a cor- 
responding excess the other way. Either 
one-sidedness is now without excuse and 
dishonorable. Among both sisterhoods and 
brotherhoods some members are always 
found to be singularly pure, self-denying 
and sweet-hearted, singularly Christlike. 



164 Thorough Service 

Others are found to be censorious, con- 
ceited, petulant, insubordinate, or of base 
imaginations. So outside of these orders, 
and all around us, there are those who from 
year to year and to the end of their lives 
make themselves poor, lonely, single, and 
take the lowest places. They do it indi- 
vidually, for the Kingdom of Heaven's sake, 
to follow Christ, to help and bless the 
needy. The sense of duty and of God's 
favor holds them up under the Cross. And 
then there are a vast number, we all know, 
everywhere, self-seeking, self-indulgent, 
self-willed. So there is no clean-cut line 
of division. There can be none. On both 
sides, in the "waves of this troublesome 
world," the net gathers of every kind. The 
state of virginity is a blessed state — some- 
times. Sometimes it is not blessed. It is 
blessed when it is either voluntarily adopted 
or cheerfully accepted because it seems to 
be the will of God — never blessed other- 
wise. Our Lord Himself — see St. Matthew, 
xix. — gave His heavenly benediction to 
those who choose to go unmarried, be- 



Thorough Service 165 

cause in the conditions where they are 
placed they can so better serve Him and 
serve His people, and He implied that they 
would always be comparatively few. He 
also gave His heavenly benediction to mar- 
riage, and guarded its sanctity with awful 
securities. Every well-taught Christian must 
revere and commemorate the Blessed Virgin 
Mary — but must remember also that she 
was a mother. Christ chose to the highest 
seats of authority in His Church — apostle- 
ship — married men, and apparently single 
men too. St. Paul preferred celibacy, gave 
his reasons, and saw the need of it in the 
terrible trials of the ministry in his mission- 
ary experience; and he as plainly uttered 
and repeated the instruction that every re- 
lationship of the family was after God's or- 
dinance, and that family-life, resting upon 
wedlock, is as evidently inherent in the 
kingdom of grace as of nature. He frames 
out of the union and love of the bridegroom 
and bride that image and symbol of the 
mystical union of Christ and His Body, the 
Church, which is sacredly significant, and 



1 66 Thorough Service 

if it were taken away the loss would rob 
both inspired and uninspired language of 
one of its most perfect and luminous illus- 
trations. 

It comes to this then: the Church Catho- 
lic has ample room for all her children, and 
all her servants. If we must think about 
comparative degrees of holiness — which is 
not very profitable — we must consider al- 
ways two things, — the amount of real, per- 
sonal sacrifice, and the motive of that sacri- 
fice. Virtue is not in conditions, orders, in- 
stitutions, offices, vocations: it is in human 
hearts and daily lives. There are women 
to whom it would be a sacrifice to marry; 
the care of a household would be a burden ; 
a husband would be a cross; constitution 
and temperament do not incline that way: 
and if they go into a religious house be- 
cause they like it, why call them saints? 
In uncounted houses at this moment, there 
are wives, there are daughters, there are 
sisters, and servants too, whom Christ calls 
every day to meet difficulties, to endure 
provocations, to go through manual drudg- 



Thorough Service 167 

ery, nursings, watchings, and even fast- 
ings, to encounter agonies of the spirit and 
weariness of the body, not surpassed cer- 
tainly in any sisterhood, religious house, 
orphanage, or hospital. How false to deny 
to these women, if they hear that voice of 
Christ and follow it, the praise bestowed 
on the recluse, or the nun? How unfair 
and how absurd to pretend that there is 
not just as much thoroughness in women's 
work here as there, — in the " religious " 
house and in the common houses which 
faith and duties make religious, alike! 

In two ways, very commonly nowadays, 
and in two unlike quarters, the separated 
women, the communities, the "religious" 
technically so-called, are misjudged. They 
are denounced, and they are envied. I 
shall take it for granted that there is no one 
in this audience so much in the dark as not 
to know that there were deaconesses in the 
primitive Church, appointed and approved 
by the Apostles of our Lord; that from that 
time on, without ceasing, to this day, great 
numbers of merciful and holy women have 



1 68 Thorough Service 

been specially set apart and employed, under 
regulations, with much variety of rules, by 
the ecclesiastical and episcopal authority; 
and that from an early period they took 
vows or made solemn public promises, — 
either temporary or perpetual. There are 
now probably several hundred such per- 
sons in several dioceses in the United States, 
and a thousand or more in England. The 
number is slowly increasing. Some of 
their methods and features are possibly un- 
wise, and if they are so they are likely to be 
mended. But there are few, if any, gross 
abuses. What it seems to me those of you 
who are not of them ought to consider is 
that the laws of female character are all the 
time just as much at work in all these 
women, under their special and exceptional 
conditions, as in society at large; that in 
some shape or other the same temptations, 
dangers, weaknesses, trials, foibles and sins, 
which beset other women, beset them; and 
that if they and you are to be saved, they 
and you must be saved by the power of the 
same grace, of the same Saviour, applied to 



Thorough Service 169 

the personal conscience and heart through 
the same means, — prayer, discipline, Scrip- 
ture and sacraments. 

Looking on one of these establishments 
from without you would say it must be an 
abode of unbroken quiet, without vexation, 
without collisions, with few if any social 
bewilderments, perhaps of terrible and de- 
pressing monotony. In point of fact it is a 
theatre of the universal, world-wide, never- 
ending, never-resting struggle of humanity 
with itself and its environments — with only 
these variations, that there are a few pecul- 
iar exposures and a few unusual helps. 
Isolation in itself beyond a certain point is 
a peril, as it was among the Oriental coeno- 
bites and in some, not all, of the Western 
monasteries, because it leaves some of the 
original faculties unused or dwarfed. Put 
six or forty or a hundred women close to- 
gether under one roof, women who have no 
natural ties, no personal affinities, no soft- 
ening influence of kindred, not choosing 
one another, but pushed against each other 
in inevitable details, and, no matter how ex- 



170 Thorough Service 

cellent the rules or skilful the policy, be sure 
the superior, mother, prioress, or the Bishop 
who undertakes the management, will have 
bruises of the spirit and many an hour of 
despair. Patience finds a grand opportunity 
to have her perfect work. All the mutual 
duties, the menial tasks, in spite of envy- 
ings and jealousies, and a sense of unfair 
inequality, have to be gone through without 
the attracting force of personal love or taste 
— nothing but sheer obedience. This is 
hard. These women must be like-hearted 
if they can, without being like-minded. In 
some cases, too, there is more provision 
made for duties Godward than duties 
womanward, for the religious life than the 
moral life. It is as if a wall were built up 
between the two tables of the Law, or be- 
tween the first and second of Christ's two 
commandments. Certain social vices and 
their solicitations are shut out, to be sure — 
luxury, covetousness, misuse of time, 
sensuous amusements and spectacles, the 
extravagances and prodigality of dress. But 
the Tempter himself is by no means shut 



Thorough Service 171 

out, and, being there on his own business, 
with all his wits about him, he only shifts 
his tactics, even to clothing himself like an 
angel. There is no fashion of a class or 
garb, no routine or bell, no crucifix or veil, 
that can bar the gateway of the thoughts, 
or by itself sanctify the soul. The work 
cannot be a thorough work till the springs 
of life are cleansed, and the silent, in- 
wrought structure of character is built on 
that one only Foundation other than which 
no man or woman can lay. 

We come to see more and more, as I 
thought you might agree with me when I 
said it at the outset, that our failures and 
our shortcomings in every line come from 
one and the same cause, and that we are to 
remedy them by a few simple principles, the 
same for you who divide and proportion 
your work between duties at home and in 
society and in the charities of churches 
where you worship, as for those who are 
set apart and consecrated by a ceremony. 
Most of you to whom I am speaking are of 
the former class. You want and you try to 



172 Thorough Service 

introduce into your mixed and not alto- 
gether satisfactory way of living a higher 
and better element. Your standard is no- 
bler than your performance. As the day 
and night go, you each see, being taught as 
a Christian, having been baptized under 
three tremendous pledges, going to church, 
saying "I believe," knowing that you are 
coming to Judgment, you see that you are 
taking too much of every week of your life 
and giving it to what makes somehow for 
yourself, too little for those poorer, weaker, 
unhappier, less taught than you are, in some 
part of the world. About this you are not 
altogether at ease. In two respects you are 
quite sure you might do better. You might 
be less selfish, and so do more; you might 
take more pains and thought, and so be 
more thorough. As to the first, get it more 
and more into your minds not only how 
large the mass of misery and iniquity about 
you is, but that it is within your reach, and 
that God put you into the world with an 
express purpose of His will that you should 
do something, do your part, woman as you 



Thorough Service 173 

are, however diffident, shy, inexperienced, 
busy or indolent— something to lighten the 
misery, to sweeten the bitterness, to purify 
the sin. That is your own express, inalien- 
able work. You must do it or you are 
meanly selfish, and God will punish you as 
you deserve. Think it over. When your 
Rector gives out the notices in the church, 
attend to them, and, if you don't know 
what they mean, inquire. When you hear 
the name of some merciful society, ask 
some one to bring you a report or statement 
of it and read it through. Ask some trusted 
acquaintance what charity she works for or 
gives to; if it startles her, no matter. We 
might as well startle or be startled as go to 
sleep and be those of whom the Bible says 
that their " damnation slumbereth not." 
When you are disgusted at the horrors in 
the newspapers, ask yourself whether you 
have done and said what you could to make 
such iniquities and crimes impossible. Take 
a walk with your brother or husband where 
you will see poverty and degradation in the 
street. Take the Spirit of Missions. Go 



174 Thorough Service 

through some hospital or orphanage. Per- 
haps you had better begin indoors. Sister 
Dora, when she was forty-one years of age, 
was asked for her opinion on woman's 
work. Her answer was plain as it is sug- 
gestive: "I feel pretty much like Balaam 
of old, as if I should give quite the con- 
trary advice to what you wanted of me. 
You would like me to urge women to work 
in hospitals, and all that. I feel more in- 
clined to harangue about women doing their 
work at home, being the helpmeet for man 
which God ordained." Without joining any 
"order" there is a sense in which your en- 
thusiasm can be kindled by the simple vow 
of the old Hospitallers, to be all their lives 
servants to some one sick or poor, so far as 
in them lay, to do and to give for the love 
of Christ. 

Now suppose your interest has been 
aroused. More obstacles than you could 
foresee, and more than you can count now 
you do see them, spring up to hinder you. 
Nobody in the house or out of it encourages 
you. Some one sneers. When the time 



Thorough Service 175 

comes to go out, or to take up charity sew- 
ing, or attend the society meeting, or take 
your turn in reading to the sick woman or 
the crippled child, there is something pleas- 
ant before you that you like better. There 
is a cloud, or bad walking. Satan knows 
your weak side. You would take hold of 
the parish charities if you were " recog- 
nized," if you were not afraid no one that 
you like would speak to you, or some one 
that you don't like would, if you were put 
into office, if you were not treated uncivilly, 
if things were managed to suit you, if the 
Rector had called and asked you personally, 
if Mrs. A. or Mrs. B., one of your "set," 
went or worked, if you knew just how to 
dress, if you understood the object, if you 
could see any sense in an " Auxiliary," if you 
"believed in foreign missions," if you 
thought it ever worth while to send money 
out of the parish instead of keeping it at 
home to pay parish expenses; in other 
words, you would be benevolent if it cost 
nothing; you would be a good Samaritan 
if you could do it by passing by on the other 



176 Thorough Service 

side ; you would give something away if you 
could give it away without taking it from 
yourself; you would take up the Cross if 
you could take it up without making a sac- 
rifice; you would be charitable if you could 
be charitable and self-indulgent at the same 
time. Who of us does not see that the 
practical and prevailing hindrances to the 
Church work of women are precisely those 
faults — of will, of heart, of temper, of in- 
dolence and pride, of Christian character, of 
imperfect discipleship to Christ, which beset 
us and shame us and put us in peril of per- 
dition everywhere ? They are the very sins 
which, as He plainly forewarns, must sep- 
arate between Him and the guilty soul. 

Indirectly, the way to get lifted up out of 
these poor disgraces of cowardice and faith- 
lessness is to lay hold of outward support. 
To furnish that very support is one of the 
purposes of combination, of the social prin- 
ciple, of the Auxiliary, the special circle that 
seeks to help the negro, the Indian, the 
pagan of a particular country, the degraded 
woman in Burmah or Utah, the Red Cross 



Thorough Service 177 

League or the City Mission. System, intel- 
ligence, information, regular appointments, 
working hours — occasions like this — they 
are so many hands that uphold and guide. 
But directly there must be the summoning 
up of a Christian will. The life of guilty 
indifference to all the wants and sufferings 
of mankind outside the petty circle of their 
own interests and enjoyments, which is 
lived by many women in every social class, 
is a stigma on your sex, and by lowering 
yours it lowers necessarily the other. It 
grows into a debasing tyranny of self-love. 
Thoroughness in woman's work means 
something far more than fine sewing, the 
due finish of a garment, or the tidy filling 
up of a box of comforts and clothing for a 
missionary family on the frontier, or punc- 
tuality at a meeting, though these also are in- 
cluded; these ought ye to have done and not 
to leave another and more comprehensive 
thing undone. Thoroughness in any work 
is the work that goes thorough in the old 
English, or through and through the mind 
and spirit of the doer of it, as well as the 



178 Thorough Service 

performance or workmanship turned out. 
Many detailed errands or heartless manual 
tasks of charity may be performed, but hast 
thou "delivered thy soul'? We never 
come into the true upper air of a life gener- 
ous as the Son of Man was generous till we 
come to regard hardships as privileges and 
labor as delight, because "life" is joy and 
"no man liveth to himself." It has been 
well said that " in hours of clear reason we 
should never say that we had made a sacri- 
fice;" and again, it may be said that "all 
in our lives which we are most glad to re- 
call is sacrificial." For "sacrifice" de- 
scribes, in its true sense, not love to man so 
much as devotion to God; not suffering, 
but dedication; not the foregoing of that 
which we might have enjoyed, but the con- 
version of that which was offered to us for 
a time into an actual possession; the invest- 
ment of things unstable and fleeting, though 
painful, with a power of unchangeable joy. 
" Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of 
the least of these, ye have done it unto 
Me." Done what ? The very things which 



Thorough Service 179 

you Church workers are seeking to do, and 
to do better and better. Hunger, thirst of 
body or spirit, strangerhood, nakedness, 
sickness, some kind of bondage or danger 
or distress, these are your opportunities. 
" Unto Me." That is the motive. It is by 
keeping nearer to Christ, and so having 
Him nearer to you, more in your thoughts, 
more in your hearts, that you grow and 
strengthen into real thoroughness. What- 
ever your other relationships, He says, you 
then become to Him "sister" or "mother." 
Whether you minister to heathen far off or 
to sufferers near your door, the Christlike- 
ness must come out. It is told of Dan- 
necker, the German sculptor, that he 
worked eight years upon his statue of 
Christ. At the end of two years he called 
a little girl into his studio, and, pointing to 
the figure, asked, "Who is that?" The 
child replied, "Some great person." The 
artist turned away disheartened. "I have 
failed," he said; "I must begin anew." 
After two years of patient labor, he again 
brought the same child before the statue. 



180 Thorough Service 

"Who is it now?" After a long, silent 
gaze, she bowed her head in adoration 
and answered, "It is He who said, Suffer 
the little children to come unto Me." Then 
Dannecker knew that his work was thor- 
ough. 

For this you will need a higher tone of 
personal spiritual life — a "life unspotted 
from the world." The Godward life must 
be first; then out of that the charitable life, 
in the divine order. This your Lord will 
accept. "This woman hath not ceased to 
kiss My feet." " Ye did it unto Me." 

Then the hand of God will be mighty 
upon us in blessing. Then your work will 
abide, whatever else passes away. 



VI. 

Spiritual Helps and Failures in Keeping 
the royal law. 



VI. 



SPIRITUAL HELPS AND FAILURES IN KEEPING THE 
ROYAL LAW. 

We have met in a common understand- 
ing that our object now is not information, 
or criticism of the past, or the proposal of 
any specific plan that is new. Lines of 
charitable work for women, as well as for 
men, are now at last — praise be to God! — 
well marked out by the Church. Others 
still, in greater number and variety, will 
disclose themselves in a providential order, 
to eyes that watch for them, and hands 
that are ready for them, as we go on. You 
are here thankful for what you have been 
permitted to do, to inquire together how to 
supply in yourselves, with fresh power and 
fulness, that living and life-giving spirit out 
of which all holy activity must come; how 
to keep the true proportion, in honor to the 
Master, between the life of Christian labor 
abroad in the world and the life of loving 
183 



184 Spiritual Helps and Failures 

devotion in the personal soul. This ques- 
tion takes us at once behind all matters of 
detail, the mere methods of organization 
and administration, to the primitive princi- 
ples of the kingdom of Christ. Through- 
out the universe of God, in things spiritual 
no less than in things material, life is not 
only "more than meat" as "the body is 
more than raiment," but life is more than 
all its own forms and organs of visible op- 
eration. And "he that hath the Son hath 
life " — he or she only, always, and every- 
where, first by the baptism of water and 
the Holy Ghost, and then by that ever- 
springing faith and ever-living personal 
communion which holds the channel al- 
ways open between the Heart of the Lord 
and the heart of every believing and loving 
work-woman in the world. 

Suppose, my friends, you stop your busy 
doing a little while, in visiting the poor, at- 
tending "circles" and societies, making 
garments, going to the county houses, and 
draw off from it a little way, just long 
enough and far enough to ask yourselves, 



In Keeping the Royal Law 185 

What is it all for? What motive propels it? 
What spirit underlies it ? What is the real 
end you are seeking? In a general way 
one might answer, "Oh! our object is to 
do good." But generalities are not always 
enough. Sometimes they hide from us 
what it is most important for us to remem- 
ber and to feel. "To do good" — yes, but 
what kind of good? "Good" in whose 
name, good by whose constant help, good 
for whose honor? Is there any actual 
" good " in these sacred undertakings which 
does not spring directly from Him who is 
Head over all things to His Church, or 
which is not pursued with a conscious com- 
munion of each personal soul with Him, or 
where this passion for His glory does not 
run through all the particulars of the service, 
sustaining and elevating, vitalizing and 
sanctifying, the whole character of that 
Christian woman by whom the service is 
performed ? 

No doubt, if we regarded nothing more 
than the external and visible objects accom- 
plished by all these diversified labors, there 



1 86 Spiritual Helps and Failures 

would still be a great deal here to challenge 
the admiration of the world. You can so 
report them, in figures and statistics, that 
they present a handsome and honorable ar- 
ray to the eye of Christian calculation. But 
is there not a finer and higher criterion than 
this by which to measure — or rather to 
weigh — the absolute worth of woman's 
work in the Church ? Are you quite satis- 
fied with that: so many dollars gathered 
and expended and counted; so many boxes 
filled and despatched; so many missionaries 
and their families (and not so very many, 
after all) fed and clothed; so many hours of 
needlework; so many patients tended, visits 
made, letters written, publications distrib- 
uted, meetings held ? I venture to invite 
you here to a loftier view of your blessed 
calling, and a more heavenly computation of 
its returns. I point you to a harvest invis- 
ible, slowly reaped with pain and penitence, 
with self-dissatisfaction, with heart-weari- 
ness and tears because you have come so 
far short of your aim; but a harvest im- 
mortal as the character where it is garnered 



In Keeping the Royal Law 187 

up, and abiding as the image of Christ, 
formed within, who is your "exceeding 
great reward " — treasure laid up against the 
day of His second "appearing." 

Let me pay you the tribute of respect to 
believe that nothing less than this will con- 
tent the aspirations of you who are met 
here before me: I mean the aim to join all 
your special performances with a large, 
deep, personal, spiritual culture; and to 
reckon no action, however beneficial to so- 
ciety or to any fellow-creature, as touched 
with its divinest charm, unless it is done as 
a dutiful and joyous free-will offering to 
Him for whom nothing can be too much, 
nothing can be counted hard; who loved 
us before we loved Him, and whom truly 
to know is life eternal. 

I shall try to help you by speaking first 
frankly of dangers, and then more gladly 
of helps and encouragements. Place as the 
first of your dangers that of falling into a 
careless repetition of whatever benevolent 
tasks you have set yourself, as if they were 
only a piece of reputable or laudable 



1 88 Spiritual Helps and Failures 

routine; the danger of forgetting from day 
to day, Him who said, ''Daughter, be of 
good cheer, thy faith hath saved thee; " the 
danger of losing sight of that Heavenly 
Face looking down upon you, which makes 
the homeliest drudgery it shines on beauti- 
ful and divine; the danger of dulling the 
keen perception by which the spiritual 
meaning is discerned under ordinary lawful 
employments, and the wine of Christian 
joy is tasted, out of the Jewish water-pots 
of stone. It is a temptation that besets the 
holiest offices. 

Is there not a possibility that, amid all 
these fair-seeming and much-praised alms- 
deeds, with their pious garniture, your tone 
may gradually degenerate, till, in the ab- 
sorption of mental attention, the irritation 
at obstacles, the perfunctory exercises, the 
worry and fret of care, the absence of self- 
examination, the unchanged worldly tem- 
per, it may prove that, notable and stirring 
disciple though you are, you are little bet- 
ter, after all, than one of the bondwomen 
of the world ? Beware, then, of the be- 



In Keeping the Royal Law 189 

numbing effects of unfelt sanctities and 
charities. In its various degrees this apathy 
renders us superficial in religion, automa- 
tons in duty, unequal to great sacrifices, 
stupid in our discriminations between right 
and wrong, wanting in vigorous condemna- 
tions of sin, as well as in clear recognitions 
of high states and graces; it produces reli- 
gious mediocrity. We are thinking all the 
while of the outside performance and its 
instruments, not of the original springs 
whence the organs derive their living force. 
We are not looking "unto the hills, " but 
bustling and peeping about in the petty 
workshop of our ecclesiastical or philan- 
thropic machinery. The mortal elements 
of the business encroach on those that are 
superhuman, and more and more they vul- 
garize the august mystery of "walking 
humbly with God," under the "powers of 
the world to come," and thus they hide His 
Glory. Ask yourself, then, not only, 
"What am I doing}" but " What am /, in 
doing it, and what am I becoming} What 
is the real life underneath all my work? 



190 Spiritual Helps and Failures 

Uncover my heart, O my God, and show 
me to myself! Am I ready to take up — 
dare I — with all its awful signification, 
David's cry in the 139th Psalm: 'Try me, 
O God, and seek the ground of my heart, 
prove me, and examine my thoughts ' ? I 
will at least entreat, with the 51st — 'Make 
me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right 
spirit within me. Cast me not away from 
Thy presence, and take not Thy Holy Spirit 
from me. Oh, give me the comfort of Thy 
help again, and stablish me with Thy free 
Spirit.' Then— not till then— then, when I 
have been so searched, cleansed, renewed, 
and empowered from on High, shall my 
work be clothed with its true and rightful 
honor and crowned with its lawful fruit; 
then 'shall I teach Thy ways unto the 
wicked/ while I feed and clothe them, and 
the ' sinners ' I visit and comfort ' shall be 
converted unto Thee! ' " 

A second danger to the Christian work of 
women is self-will. I point it out with re- 
liance on your candid and patient judg- 
ment. It is undeniably true that those who 



In Keeping the Royal Law 191 

have attempted to organize and carry on 
holy labors by Christian women, whether 
Bishops, Rectors, or others — have been, 
over and over, thwarted, disappointed, and 
saddened by this obstinate difficulty — a re- 
luctance of those who are set about the 
work to work under direction. The diffi- 
culty is aggravated, probably, in this coun- 
try, by the prevalent habit of self-guidance 
in social, domestic, and political lines of 
life, in manners, in religion, in all sorts of 
beliefs and preferences. Our institutions 
being democratic, and the doctrine of self- 
help and self-reliance being conspicuous in 
our rationalistic and transcendental philoso- 
phy, deference to authority being construed 
into a mark of mental servility, and the 
schools, to say nothing of parents, educat- 
ing all children to think and act for them- 
selves — in short, discipline, in all pursuits, 
being made of less account than enterprise 
and energy, how can we wonder, the na- 
tional air being so charged with the spirit 
of independence, that our young people 
should drink it in, and so grow up self-con- 



i cp Spiritual Helps and Failures 

fident, at least, if not insubordinate? 
Where every boy is told to be his own 
master, why should not every girl be ex- 
pected to be her own mistress ? We may 
imagine that among churchwomen the 
popular notion of " women's rights " will 
be held in check; and in its extreme, coarse 
form it certainly is. But if we consider that 
" rights " are always in a certain relation to 
duties, and then inquire which of these is 
most likely to get the start and come upper- 
most, we shall be apt to see that we have 
still a great deal left to do in learning how 
to be led. One thing is certain; institutions 
of any sort cannot be managed by a mob. 
Many minds cannot act together without 
rule. Complicated interests clash and col- 
lapse except for law. Even a parish sew- 
ing-school comes to be a jangle and a 
misery where a few ambitious persons im- 
port the competitions and pushings of 
secular society into the sallies of philan- 
thropy. It is worse when the members of 
a sisterhood, the inmates of a deaconess- 
house, the nurses in a hospital, the associ- 



In Keeping the Royal Law 193 

ates in a Church school or mission, allow 
themselves in the childish fallacy that the 
main point with each one is to see that her 
own province is not invaded, that authority 
is equalized, that privileges and dignities 
are leveled, and, in short, that to the farth- 
est extreme possible she has her own way. 
Make it a principle, as soon as you enter on 
any good effort with other women, to set 
bravely aside a good large share of your 
own likings, pet theories, whims, and the 
whole stock of your prejudices. You are 
all well aware how plausible the pretext is 
that the insubordinate course is a matter of 
conscience, and that the stand taken is in 
obedience to a " higher law." So we are apt 
to confound ourselves with our cause, hav- 
ing first adroitly convinced ourselves that 
'the cause which we have espoused is God's 
cause, as against all the other causes of our 
neighbors or our house-mates. The fact is 
that the will and the conscience live very 
near to each other in the natures of many 
men and many women, and the one is 
easily mistaken for the other. You have 



194 Spiritual Helps and Failures 

heard of the troublesome Scotchman who, 
being asked what conscience is, said, " It is 
something in me that says, 'I wont!'" 
There are not a few well-meaning Church 
workers of both sexes who estimate their 
fidelity to duty chiefly by this negative scale 
— i. e. t by the degree to which they are in 
opposition. They take crotchets for prin- 
ciples. Wait awhile, when you get into 
conflict with those set over you, and from 
day to day and hour to hour ask yourself, 
"How much of this determined zeal of 
mine is for Christ and how much for my- 
self ?" There was once, two hundred 
years ago, in France, a large house of con- 
secrated people dwelling together for a 
united life of charity and prayer, where 
various religious interests were represented 
under a very wise and apostolic head. 
Three members of this sacred community 
fell out with one another. It was a quarrel 
of precedence, a dispute for official rank, 
and had to be referred to the presiding 
mind, the expectation being that he would 
of course assign the coveted post to one or 



In Keeping the Royal Law 195 

another of the three contestants. To their 
wholesome surprise he told them, after de- 
liberation, that they had all alike proved 
themselves unfit for advancement by this 
self-seeking contention ; that the proof was 
clear that they had made too little progress 
in the school of Christ, and that only they 
who are content to take the lowest place in 
that school can be bidden to "go up 
higher"; and then he sent them all back to 
spend a week in private devotion to the 
humiliations of Jesus, beseeching Him to 
grant them a better mind. 

They who are not equal to respect for 
this law had better not push forward into a 
specially holy and cross-bearing vocation. 
You say it is hard. Yes, it is hard; but 
who made it hard ? Not the love of God, 
but our own self-love. And was it not laid 
down at the beginning, among the original 
principles of this kingdom and this life, that 
it should be hard? "Except you take up 
the cross." There it is. Undoubtedly it is 
hard — this self-surrender, with all its par- 
ticulars of crucifixion, the contradiction of 



196 Spiritual Helps and Failures 

sinners, the fruitless endeavor, the disturb- 
ance of comfort, the torture of sensibility, 
the unappreciated struggle, the contemptu- 
ous look or speech of a superior, the in- 
different rector, the overcautious bishop, 
the ingratitude of the pauper, the dirt and 
disorder, the foul odor and disgusting appe- 
tite, the unseasonable interruption, the im- 
patience, the "cross" laid not only on the 
leisure-liking body, but on the finer tastes, 
the affections, the intellect, the literary in- 
dulgence — it is hard. The solitude with no 
sympathy, or the strife of tongues with no 
"pavilion" to hide in, and, finally, the un- 
ruliness of your own tongue! Oh! the 
poison and the dagger and the fire of the 
tongue, in all these labors of the Lord! 
The critical tongue, the censorious tongue, 
the backbiting, and stinging, and estrang- 
ing tongue, trailing the mischief of the ser- 
pent over all hallowed places and preten- 
sions! But then, again, the peace and the 
strength and the glory, too, of those who 
are found meet and equal to the battle! 
conquerors, and more than conquerors 



In Keeping the Royal Law 197 

through Him that hath loved them! 
There are not many sweeter satisfactions 
than those that spring up as the after- 
math of magnanimity and self-sacrifice. 
May He give you, dear friends, such grace 
— He, the magnanimous and most gracious 
Christ — so that out of your sore battles 
with self, self-indulgence, self-pleasing, 
self-praise, self-will, and from among the 
broken pillars of your pride there may rise 
up and grow — yielding both flower and 
fruit — "that most excellent gift" of the 
Lord's charity, the encircling vine which is 
the very bond of peace and of all virtues, 
without which whosoever liveth is counted 
dead! 

If there were space, something might be 
said of the danger of attaching to your 
religious services the idea of personal merit 
Probably some of those who consecrate 
their lives specially, if their hearts were laid 
quite bare would be seen to feel a little of 
that complacency in it which is nothing in 
the world but a modified form of the sin of 
the Pharisee, and which brought from the 



198 Spiritual Helps and Failures 

merciful lips of our Lord the sharpest re- 
bukes He ever uttered. That subtle legal- 
ism is no more Hebrew than American. 
Workers may be proud of their "work," as 
fanatics are of their "faith/' Still more 
likely is it that some of those women who 
divide their time between philanthrophy 
and fashion, or intersperse a gay and am- 
bitious social career with occasional acts of 
liberality and a regular attendance at relief 
meetings, or take their turns at an employ- 
ment society, if they were to speak out just 
what is in their hearts would say apologet- 
ically, "Oh, yes, to be sure, my life is 
rather worldly; let me, then, throw into it 
a little of this redeeming element of Church 
work!" Redeeming? They forget that 
redeeming is, to the Christian, something 
altogether beyond all that we do ; and that 
no Church work, even to the bestowing of 
all our goods or time to feed the poor, any 
more than the Church itself, can take the 
Redeemer's place. The best use of any 
part of us cannot be substituted for the 
sanctifying of the whole heart in us; and 



In Keeping the Royal Law 199 

that only is the accepted gift which is not 
purchase-money for salvation, but a thank- 
offering to the Saviour. What matter if it 
empties us of ourselves, humiliates our 
vanity, and makes us ashamed of our 
weakness ? One greater than you and me 
gloried in that "weakness," because in it 
Christ's strength was made manifest. 
Henceforth he takes pleasure "in infirmi- 
ties, in reproaches, in necessities, in perse- 
cutions, in distresses, for Christ's sake." 
The spiritual law is that when we are least 
sufficing to ©urselves we are ready to admit 
Him, whom otherwise, being self-satisfied, 
we should never seek or welcome. Mrs. 
Browning, in her "Vision of Poets," has a 
striking paraphrase: 

" I am content to be so bare 
Before the archers, everywhere 
My wounds being stroked with heavenly air. 

* I know,' is all the sufferer saith, 

• Knowledge by suffering entereth, 
And life is perfected by death.' " 

It is time to name, now, two or three of 
the chief helps by which these adverse in- 
fluences, besetting the highest and purest 



20o Spiritual Helps and Failures 

of callings, may be resisted, and the soul be 
kept single in its aim, true to its vows, and 
near to Him who calls us and who goes be- 
fore us. 

It seems to me that among these you 
should set foremost seasons of seclusion, 
carefully provided for and systematically 
guarded in your regular plan of living. Our 
blessed Master Himself was as often alone 
as in the temple; and certainly the power 
of His night-hours in the Mount is felt in 
His works among human dwellings and in 
His preaching by the wayside. Among the 
Apostles, to what an inferior level should 
we reduce their whole history and utterance 
if we struck away the traces of their fre- 
quent retreats into solitude, where they con- 
tinued instant in prayer! Is it not remark- 
able, too, in the biography of great charac- 
ters outside the Scriptural history, how 
uniformly they have, for some period of 
their lives, been held apart from their kind ? 
Much intercourse with people tends, no 
doubt, to make us ready and broad in sym- 
pathy; but, if it is perpetual, it tends also 



In Keeping the Royal Law 201 

to make us superficial and thin in faith; and 
this, you know well, is the tendency of 
the times we are living in. It was in mercy 
that Christ took pains to draw the disciples 
aside: "Come ye apart and rest a while." 
Deserts and silences appear to have been 
regarded as a positive requirement in the 
economy of mediation. I believe it is 
quite impossible to maintain the religious 
life at its highest pitch or healthiest pulse 
without such a frequent sequestration as 
shuts off the intrusion of people, leaving an 
unobstructed access to the soul for the Holy 
Spirit. No doubt, much is to be religiously 
gained from intercourse with others; and 
most especially with the poor in their 
homes. If you would know how much, 
and how splendidly this mingling with the 
lowly, the illiterate, and the weak may illu- 
minate a career otherwise ordinary, you 
find it set forth with uncommon beauty and 
power in that book which English and 
American women have lately read with 
tears in their eyes — the Biography of Sister 
Dora. They must visit the poor, it strikes 



202 Spiritual Helps and Failures 

me, with a very shallow mind who do not 
gather from them quite as much as they im- 
part to them, bearing it away for their own 
warning, or comfort, or thanksgiving. All 
human lives that touch one another at all 
color and shape one another. When we 
see, in our visits, the sufferings wrought 
by sin, it would be shameful if our own 
sins were not reproved and made hateful. 
And so it would be a terrible loss if each 
instance of saintly goodness or domestic 
magnanimity that we meet there did not 
revive our own flagging virtue, or quicken 
us a little in our inglorious and halting way. 
Nothing of this kind, however, will hap- 
pen, unless by voluntary and responsible 
attention we turn what Providence shows 
us of the workings of His hand in these 
neighbor-lives into testimonies and com- 
mandments and promises for ourselves; 
unless we cry with all our might, "Show 
Thou me," by these side-lights about my 
path, "the way that I should walk in, for I 
lift up my soul unto Thee." 
It will remain true, after all, beyond any 



In Keeping the Royal Law 203 

doubt, that the two principal instruments 
for keeping us religiously equal to the de- 
mands of our active work are those which 
all the great teachers in holy things since 
the days of the fathers, all the deepest read- 
ers of the human heart, all the masters and 
doctors in the mysteries of the kingdom, 
and all the profoundest and most practical 
writers of devotional books, patristic and 
mystical, Roman and Protestant alike, have 
set foremost — viz, meditation and prayer. 1 

Of these two, in our modern habit, and 
perhaps everywhere, unless it may have 
been in the extraordinary monastic or con- 
ventual discipline, meditation has held the 
secondary place. It is the more difficult — 
to do well, at least. It has not, as prayer 
has, the stimulus of a petition for something 
of which we feel the want. It has not the 
same helps of prepared forms of words. It 
exacts more self-command in controlling 
and concentrating the mind. Yet you all 
feel it to be a duty. I suggest then four 

1 Some sentences in what follows have occurred in a 
former part of this volume. 



204 Spiritual Helps and Failures 

simple rules: i. That one would best be- 
gin the practice by taking, to think of, some 
distinct theme, like a grace of character, an 
attribute of God, a quality of Christ's life on 
earth, or one of His offices to the soul, or a 
feature of the heavenly blessedness, or the 
phases and devices of some special tempta- 
tion. 2. That a time should be chosen 
when the mind is least absorbed by some 
pressing interest or distracting anxiety. 
3. That, while a perusal of prepared medi- 
tations should not be allowed to become a 
substitute for our own, we should not re- 
fuse to aid a wandering or sluggish mood 
by short readings in such authors as we 
find most nutritious or luminous; and 4, 
that we never hamper or confine the exer- 
cise of meditation by a too rigid adherence 
to a method, or render it dry. " Where the 
Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty. " 

Of prayer I speak finally, and here but 
briefly because of the richness and fulness 
and accessibleness of devout classics in the 
literature of the Church. It will be enough 
for the present if in a very few sentences I 



In Keeping the Royal Law 205 

record, without argument or illustration, a 
kind of summary of what I have found out 
by use, rather than by any external author- 
ity, of the laws of secret devotion. 1. The 
grand argument for prayer is praying. Al- 
most any amount of reasoning, without 
the practice, comes short of the aim. Like 
Professor Tyndall's notorious prayer-test, 
ratiocination takes the hearer out of the 
whole sphere of the matter treated into one 
where it can neither be analyzed nor appre- 
hended. 2. You will be more likely to in- 
duce a non-praying person to pray by wak- 
ing up wants in him, which he feels no 
man can satisfy, than by either precept or 
example; and far more likely to confirm 
and establish him in the practice by per- 
suading him to try the experiment for him- 
self than by any directory or regulation. 
3. There are times when the spirit wants to 
be alone and to dwell on things divine. 
Take advantage of those times; indulge the 
heavenly impulse; put your common things 
aside; you will lose nothing in the end, and 
you will gain for that life which has no end. 



206 Spiritual Helps and Failures 

Almost everybody prays ; even infidels pray 
when they come to a point of danger or 
distress so fearful that they can do nothing 
of themselves. All doubts vanish then. 
What can this mean ? It can only mean 
God's purpose and goodness — "I will, 
therefore, that men pray everywhere." 
Private prayers, or the prayers of personal 
religion, cannot well be too specific. We 
fail there oftenest by generality. 4. It may 
be a paradox to the understanding, but it is 
not so to faith, that we should always ex- 
pect answers, and yet never be disappointed 
to despair if we do not get them; what a 
real answer to prayer is being beyond our 
knowledge. If we believe and trust at all, 
we must believe and trust through and 
through. 5. If we do not, at any time, 
relish praying, or find it a reality, it may be 
a reason why indirect measures should be 
taken to restore spiritual health, but not a 
reason for omitting the duty altogether. It 
is well to have a secret personal liturgy, ad- 
mitting of more or less variation, to be used 
daily, whatever the mood, or occupation, 



In Keeping the Royal Law 207 

or circumstances may be, and with this as 
a minimum to leave room for what is most 
spontaneous, occasional, or familiar, the two 
principles of order and freedom running 
through the spritual life as well as through 
the spiritual world. 6. Except supplication 
for ourselves is attended by much interces- 
sion, by thanksgiving and praise, prayer is 
too much sunk in self-interest, and yields 
but a partial blessing. 7. And, finally, 
nothing that is of weight enough for a 
Christian man's thoughts or wishes is too 
trivial for his devotions. "Be careful for 
nothing; but in everything — in everything 
— by prayer and supplication, with thanks- 
giving, let your requests be made known 
unto God; and the peace of God, which 
passeth all understanding, shall keep your 
hearts and minds, through Christ Jesus." 

Pray, then, as those who always expect 
to be answered, and yet will never faint if 
no answer seems to come. The sky is not 
brass, the earth is not iron. Pray sometimes 
from the sudden sense of need overtaking 
and overwhelming you, with swift and 



208 Spiritual Helps and Failures 

short ejaculations, as you run, or teach, or 
toil, sending up the arrows that catch fire as 
they fly. Pray often after secret and ordered 
meditation, the preparation of self-scrutiny, 
and the study of the promises. Pray out 
of deep waters where your feet will often 
feel feebly after the Rock. Pray with a 
great deal of thanksgiving. Abound in in- 
tercessions — the especial and highest fulfill- 
ing of the " Royal Law." Intercede par- 
ticularly, one by one, for those men or 
those women who seem to hinder you, to 
tempt or thwart you, to block your way 
with mysterious oppositions, and so at once 
purge your souls of every hateful feeling, 
and conquer at least the one adversary who, 
if he reigns within, reigns with absolute 
and fatal dominion. 

Nor will you, any of you, I am sure, ever 
overlook the singular comforting and un- 
speakable help at the altar, the supreme act 
of all Christian worship and adoration, 
where, feeding on Christ in the heart by 
faith, taking the pledges of His sacrifice in 
our very hands, eating and drinking, our 



In Keeping the Royal Law 209 

sinful bodies made clean by His Body, and 
our souls washed through His most precious 
Blood, we dwell in Him, and He in us — all 
the company of heaven drawing near. 

We have come at last to the Source of all 
power and peace. As all our failure and 
misery come of weakness, so what we need 
is power. Where shall we find it ? Tell 
us that, and you tell us all. Whence shall 
it come ? The eagle's path hath not known 
it, nor the way of the sea, nor the place 
where the seven thunders utter their voices. 
It is not in ourselves; not in more learning, 
or experience, or new methods of study, or 
multiplied gestures, or pageants, or peals of 
music, or altered surroundings. Once for 
all the Lord has told us, "Come to Me; 
come closer; abide with Me, abide in Me." 
" If I went back to teach and tend my hos- 
pital patients again," Sister Dora said as she 
lay dying — all her wondrous, half-miracu- 
lous human strength departing — "I should 
dwell more than ever on the need of build- 
ing all our hopes on Jesus only." One even- 
ing, when all the cabmen of the town had 



210 Spiritual Helps and Failures 

promised her, at her request, to attend an 
evening mission-room service, and the 
clergyman was going to speak to them, she 
said to him, ■ ' Oh ! speak to them to-night on 
this text: ' What think ye of Christ?' Make 
it ring in their ears ! " And because it comes 
from Him, the Holy One, this power will be 
holy power. It is power to do holy things 
— not mere showy, or startling, or enter- 
prising things, or clever things; not to 
create sensations, as the children of this 
world do, for all that is only an imitation of 
strength, and is done on the handsomest 
scale by the weakest kind of men and 
women. It is power to use all the faculties 
of your nature and all the opportunities of 
your life — at home, in society, in the Church 
— for sacred and spiritual ends. Power to 
be faithful even among the faithless; sim- 
ple, in an artificial and ostentatious com- 
munity; to be unfashionable when fashions 
do shame to the honor of Christ or the 
honor of woman whose body is His tem- 
ple; power to be moderate where extrava- 
gance is an idol ; to be sincere where du- 



In Keeping the Royal Law 211 

plicity is profitable; it is power to make 
loyalty to Christ and obedience to His Royal 
Law as firm and uncompromising as they 
are unpretending! You can judge whether 
you are growing spiritually or wasting, my 
friends, according as you are gaining or 
losing that power. 

O, had we only the patience and the 
constancy and the fervor! Were we only 
worthy to add some sacrifice, some watch- 
fulness, some kindness, every day! Then 
the heavenly strength of "conquerors and 
more than coquerors " would be storing it- 
self up in us; then, forecasting the future, 
we should know what it means to say that 
nothing shall "ever separate us from the 
love of God," and these poor groanings of 
doubt and fear that we hear so often from 
one another would be still. Then our dear 
Church would convert more unbelievers to 
its Creed; and then the walls and gates of 
the New City which St. Augustine saw 
would come out more clearly on the eyes 
of Christian expectation, where "they cease 
not, faint not, and are never weary, through 



212 Spiritual Helps and Failures 

all the everlasting and acceptable year of 
the Lord!" 

We are now going away, separating, 
traveling on in our unknown, individual 
paths. " Without Me ye can do nothing." 
Be that the word we carry away with us, 
my dear friends, and keep with us in dark- 
ness and light, working together or work- 
ing alone, in freshness or weariness — a 
word of almighty promise. Let us all say 
it back to Him here, this moment, with 
our whole hearts, and say it always to the 
end, "Without Thee, O Christ, we can do 
nothing! " And then each one may say in 
holy confidence, and in a power not our 
own, "I can do all things through Christ 
strengthening me." 



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